10 Must-Know Rules for Effective Copywriting

How to engage the reader and encourage them to take action.

Copywriting is the process or occupation of writing the text for advertising or other forms of marketing, often on the internet.

Copy aims to influence and persuade the audience to think, feel, or act in a certain way and usually take some form of action.

The better our copy is, the more effective it should be to elicit a result such as a higher conversion rate.

The writer must determine the optimum way to communicate with their audience.

Follow these ten rules to improve the quality of your copy.

1. Understand your topic

Before writing in general, it’s essential to understand your topic and what you are trying to achieve.

Start by writing down everything about your topic. You won't use everything but might uncover something you haven’t thought of yet.

Questions to brainstorm include:

What is the product/service/brand/thing? Describe it in simple terms with two to three sentences. This sentence is your elevator pitch — as if you were describing a product to a customer.
What makes it unique or special? What features make it different from the alternatives out there? What does this product offer that others don’t? Your positioning and unique selling proposition (USP) comes in here.
What benefits appeal most to your audience? People want to know what is in it for them. Customers often care more about the usefulness of features rather than the features themselves.
Does it alleviate pain? People typically buy for one of two reasons; to increase pleasure or to minimise pain. Talking about a shared pain and how you help eliminate it can be more effective for some products or services than focusing on the pleasure provided. You can test both approaches in different copy, to test what works best.

2. Write for the audience

Are you writing for your audience or writing for other writers?

With copy, the many technicalities of the English language aren’t as important as they are in academic writing, for example.

Many of the general public won’t notice some technical grammatical errors. Many people don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘their’, or ’you’re’ and ‘your’… So don’t overthink it.

Understand who your audience is and write for them. Do your readers want to be entertained, informed, or educated? How can your article provide value to them?

3. Capture attention with the title

The title is a writer’s first and most significant chance to attract a captive audience.

“A piece of copy stands or falls by its headline. The headline is like the doorway into the room you’ve created with the rest of your text. If people don’t walk through the door, they’ll never see what’s inside the room.” (Albrighton, 2013)

The title is a promise of value and benefit to the reader from reading it.

The writer must create intrigue to capture the reader’s attention, generate interest, and encourage them to read.

The title also helps set the tone for the following copy. It establishes the writing piece’s theme and positions the subject for the reader, allowing them to decide if it is relevant to keep reading.

Headings often are not finished until the writing is ready for publishing.

Be careful not to give empty promises or use a clickbait title. We want to build rapport with readers to enhance our credibility — not leave the reader feeling empty-handed.

4. Keep the reader engaged

Copy needs to keep the reader's attention long enough for them to get to the punchline or call to action.

If the reader is only scrolling through your writing without actually taking it all in, then it’s going to be pretty hard to get your message across.

Start your writing with the idea that is interesting and relevant to the audience. Otherwise, people might only read a couple of sentences and decide it is not worth their time.

“At its root, your challenge is to make a connection with a human being.” (Iezzi, 2010)

5. Evoke emotions

Copy should evoke emotion. We want the reader to feel something.

Tension attracts attention. Creating tension is a great way to elicit an emotional response. Creating a line between two things generates conversation through tension.

For example, do you know the worst thing about winter? Snow. Snow is so stupid.

If you love the snow, you’re probably annoyed now and more likely to read on. Why? Because you want to know what my terrible reasons are for not liking snow.

6. Tell a story

Storytelling feels real, immediate and personal.

Good writing should tell the narrative to capture the moments and experiences shared by humans. A human component to a brand increases consumer trust, as it helps the brand seem more relatable.

Tell a compelling story while convincing the audience of the need for what you are promoting. Create a distinct beginning, middle and end to your story.

Using this structure will make your writing easier to follow and understand.

7. Keeping a consistent tone

The tone of your writing influences your brand identity. It is what you say and how you say it.

This communication style should be consistent, so every piece of your writing feels like it comes from a single source. Having a single voice seems more authentic, which means your audience will find you more trustworthy.

It is reassuring when a person says the same things and does the same things consistently.

8. Use aesthetic visuals

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, aesthetic means something is “pleasing in appearance”.

Aesthetics translates to writing, too.

If done well and the writer uses relevant visuals that complement the copy, visuals can encourage the reader to read the rest of the text. If it’s not pleasing to the eye, people probably won’t read it.

As well as using imagery such as photography, illustration or infographics, the visual component of copy includes the chosen typography/font, overall design and layout of the writing, and contrasting colours.

The worst thing you can do as a writer is making your writing harder to read. People using blue as a background, for example, because it looks pretty, I’m looking at you.

“Generally, both pictures and headlines could lead the consumers to read the body copy. In fact, pictures could send a particular message faster than the words do.” (Zulkifly & Firdaus, 2014)

9. Structure your writing to flow logically

Writing must flow.

If the copy is disjointed and isn’t structure in a way that’s easy to follow and understand, you’ll lose the reader.

Learning how to structure writing often comes from the experience of organising and shaping many different types of material into pieces of content.

Some writers use a templated structure. Others first get their ideas down on paper to gain a sense of what pattern or format emerges.

Tinkering with the writing structure is often ongoing until completion. As the text evolves, it starts to turn into a tidier format.

Do not try to format writing online like a traditional document, writing in long paragraphs. Aim for one point per sentence and one theme or idea per section, about 3 or 4 sentences long. They could be even less.

Every new idea should be on a separate line, and your writing should be simple with minimal jargon and easy for the reader to follow.

Writing can be structured by:

Benefits: Since communicating benefits are at the heart of good copywriting, using them to guide your writing structure should mean you are persuasive.

Promise something of value to the reader. How can you meet their needs?

If your product or service solves a problem, make sure people know it. Structure your writing around this, with each section explaining how you deliver a particular benefit.

“Copywriting that focuses on benefits is more persuasive, more compelling and sells better.” (Albrighton, 2013)

Features: At times, you might be writing for a technically educated audience, so structuring copy to highlight features could be the best approach.

The problem then solution: the writing begins by describing a problem that the audience will relate to before explaining how you provide a solution/ what the solution is. Ultimately, most copywriting should have a component of this format.

A numbered list: Break down the points you want to make in a numbered format can add a sense of organisation, even if your writing is not that focused.

10. Include a key takeaway and call to action

What is the takeaway for the reader? What do you want them to learn, understand better, or think about?

As writers, we want our audience to think, feel or act in a certain way after reading or listening to your message. You give the reader an “aha moment” — a new insight.

Writing should have the intent to impact the perceptions and ideas of the reader.

“Insight is not a sudden flash that comes from nowhere, but in fact is the result of the unconscious mind piecing together loosely connected bits of information stemming from prior knowledge and experiences and forming novel associations among them.” (Carpenter, 2019)

After the aha moment, our goal with writing is often to encourage the reader to take a particular course of action. For example, to buy, donate, click here, or contact us.

This call to action guides the audience towards a real-world activity.

The desired response to the call to action should be clear, specific and straightforward.

Key takeaways

This article has explored ten rules for writing great copy. I’ll now quickly summarise the key points.

Although grammar is important, don’t take the technicalities of writing over-seriously. Focus instead on engaging the reader through telling a story that generates an emotional response.

Write for the enjoyment of our audience — whether that’s to entertain, educate, make them think hard about something, or give them a giggle.

The visual component and title frames our writing and evokes a reader’s initial interest. Then, we must keep them engaged and interested.

Tell a narrative to capture the human aspect of your story, connecting with readers. Let your personality shine through and try and make your audience feel something.

Finally, structure your writing logically to make the copy easy for the reader to follow. Leave them with a takeaway and a course of action that is understandable and actionable.

Thank you for reading.

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