While I won’t be covering successful pick-up lines, there is a resemblance I can’t ignore…

Whether it’s your landing page, your email, your deck, your one-pager, or whatever…your opening line will determine the trajectory of your campaign or effort.

If that beginning header is unclear, difficult to read, nonsensical, or simply doesn’t catch your audience’s attention…then you lost before you began.

There are various Landing Page tutorials turned memes that state the obvious:

  • Your main header’s job is to get you to read the subheader…
  • The subheader’s main goal is to get you to continue reading below it…body of text, benefit list, whatever comes next…
  • …and so on to get your audience to take a specific action

This means if your opening line doesn’t grab their attention, then they won’t continue to the rest of your material or asset to understand more of your value, benefits, or WTF your startup actually does. Same with an email’s subject line to open an email, a topic for a blog post, or a title for a presentation or slide, and so on.

So when writing your copy or content, first consider who you’re really talking to, so they understand the language and catch your drift. Then consider whether your copy needs to be written or delivered differently to better convey your point. And is your message clear and straightforward, so your user can easily understand what you actually mean.

With all that covered, check your flow from one line to the next and whether you begin with a really good opening line that gets them to proceed to the next one, and the next one, and hopefully get them to take action.