A Beginner’s Guide to UX Copywriting

User-experience copywriting or UX copywriting involves designing and writing a copy that drives users such as customers or site visitors towards fulfilling a goal in a natural way.

This blog will break down that term – UX Copywriting – and understand it in detail.

What Is User Experience (UX)?

UX explains why, when, and how users engage with a product or service and what they feel about their experience. If you are wearing clothes, eating meals, and have a house to live in, you have various user experiences each second.

Let’s take a look at an example from our everyday life.

If you wear sweaters, you are that product’s “user,” and your “experience” starts way before you get all warm and cozy.

First, you understand that you need sweaters. Maybe your old ones have got fabric pills, or you have just grown out of them (many of us go through this). So you decide to buy some new sweaters. You weigh your options and finally pick out some you’d like to have. You purchase them, unpack them and at last, put them on.

Almost anything can make a positive or a negative experience. For example, suppose you ordered a turtleneck sweater but received a crewneck sweater instead.

Negative experience!

All user experiences are influenced by multiple factors, such as:

• The reason a user decides to buy or use a product/services first of all
• The time of the day and year the product is used
• Any hassle or delightful surprises the user encounters
• The way the user feels throughout the entire journey

While user experience or UX is applicable to physical as well as digital products, the rest of the blog focuses on the digital one. In digital marketing, user experience can be optimized by understanding the target audience and building brand and product interactions that are intuitive and suitable for people’s needs.

Using a copy is the best way to drive the prospects towards a user experience that accomplishes both goals – theirs and ours.

Copywriting Is All About Purpose and Persuasion

Copywriting is “always” done with a clearly defined goal in mind.

In order to accomplish that goal, we try to understand the desires our target audience already has and then showcase to them how our product or service can satisfy them.

Eventually, a copy should be able to persuade the readers to take the desired action – no words wasted.

Making Your Copy More UX-Friendly

As mentioned earlier, UX copywriting involves writing and designing a copy that drives users such as customers or site visitors towards fulfilling a goal naturally.

If you are also a regular internet user just like us, you must have noticed such copies in plenty of headlines, button copy, and microcopy. Let’s understand each of them with an example.

UX-Friendly Headlines

Being new to UX copywriting, you must be keen to grasp as much information as you can from various sources meaning you are perpetually hunting for good books, training programs, and professional courses to polish your skills.

But although you are actively seeking guidance, you probably won’t purchase a UX copywriting kit from a random boy sitting in a backstreet. Perhaps you also won’t just go following some advice you ran into online.

To enhance your ability to write compelling copies, you may want to ensure that you acquire your copywriting resources from a trustworthy source – perhaps a UX copywriter.

When a compelling copy greets a user as soon as they land on your website, their minds will be blown.

Your headline should acknowledge where your customers are currently standing in the journey and offer them something they genuinely need.

In order to make your headline contribute to a good customer experience, be sure to do the following:

• Keep your copy short and brief
• Use bold text formatting to highlight the benefits of that particular page
• Establish a direct connection between the reader and the copy by addressing their wants or needs, encouraging them to keep reading, and then ultimately sign up or subscribe or purchase something or take any other desired action.

UX-Friendly Microcopy

The role social media plays in all of our lives today is just indispensable, and there is no denying it. Being a regular social media user, you must have often come across social media ads.

As a UX-copywriter, producing social media copies is also one of our many responsibilities. And we do have an absolute interest in finding out how social media ads engage people that too so well. This is not a shot in the dark; it is backed by statistics that prove that social media advertising has become a significant part of a business’ overall marketing strategy.

Now since you are on a journey of becoming a knowledgeable UX-copywriter with utter interest in social media ad copies, you come across an ad that reads –

“Forget the Images – Social Media Ad Copies Work Wonders for Your Business” followed by the writer’s name and a teeny tiny microcopy that shows the estimated reading time required to read the post.

While the post’s headline instantly intrigues you to quickly open the post and find out answers to all your questions, the little microcopy tells you how much time you must put aside to read this post.

With this information, you can easily determine whether your schedule is flexible enough at the moment to spare you some time for it or if you should just save the post to read later.

Thus although the reader may not read the post right away, they will save it for later, thanks to the microcopy, which gave them a heads up on time required. This, too, brings the user a step closer to what we can say the primary goal at present – read the post. \

UX-Friendly Button Copy

The copy on any call-to-action button should have the power to entice the readers to click on it by making them believe that it will solve their problems and improve the quality of their lives.

A lot of websites persuade visitors to click on the button by placing a text right above it, which offers them something exciting in exchange for taking the desired action, i.e., clicking the button. You can reward the visitors by either offering them a free eBook or discount coupon or a month’s membership for free and so on. This makes the click even more persuasive.

To make sure your button copy contributes to a positive user experience, make sure to do the following:

• Place the text on the center so that the user’s eyes are focused right where they need to click the button.
• Set it apart from the rest of the text on the page by using a different color for it to make it easier for people to realize that it serves a unique purpose
• Try formatting your copy in a way that disrupts the sentence pattern and stops the readers from just skimming and scanning. For example, you can use upper case for a particular word.

While crafting a button copy, the crucial thing to bear in mind is to simplify things as much as possible to make sure the readers don’t need to think at all.

Whether the user is browsing a page or clicking a button, they want clarity and make decisions that give them a good feeling.

How to Use UX Copywriting to Make the Users’ Journey Easier (So All of Us Can Achieve Our Goals)

As copywriters and digital marketers, one of our main responsibilities includes listening attentively to the audience’s wants and needs and then showcase the simplest ways they can achieve their goals – without any disturbances or wastage of words.

The key to doing this is:

• Listen to the audience – We must become aware of the hopes, expectations, wants, fears, disappointments, goals, and dreams of our target audience. The more insights we have on these aspects, the better copy and user experience we can build.
• Embrace the web conventions – On crucial pages such as landing pages, emails, sales pages, or checkout pages, users expect buttons to look like “buttons.” They expect the hyperlinks to be highlighted, titles to be in bold, messages to be relevant, and so on. If you are not employing the best web practices, you might confuse and lose out on many potential customers.

Wrap Up

In a nutshell, both customers, as well as businesses, have significant goals that are the primary motivators behind why one has built a website, and the other is visiting it. The role of copywriters is to identify where these goals align and then demonstrate to them how they can fulfill their goals in the most effortless way possible. A good UX copy helps make the user journey seamless and plays an important part in pushing visitors to convert.