If the first descriptions that come to mind when you think of your target audience are leads and customers, you have a potential empathy problem on your hands. 

Before they are leads and customers, the people in your audience are humans first, with feelings and real-life issues. And the key to connecting with them is infusing empathy in your writing—I mean, write like a human writing to another human whose pain you understand.

Empathy is one of the most impactful elements provoking emotions as a copywriter. Your audience needs to feel genuine empathy in your communication.

Do you know your audience’s pain points?

Do you know what keeps them up at night?

Do you have an idea of their goals and interests?

Or are you all about making the next sale or conversion?

Empathy is one of the most impactful elements provoking emotions as a copywriter. Your audience needs to feel genuine empathy in your communication.

In this blog article, I’ll be sharing 4 tips for writing empathic copy that converts. Here we go.

1. Speak the buyer’s language 

The goal of speaking your buyers’ language is for them to feel comfortable talking with you. You know, make them feel at home. Think of it as having a genuine conversation with a friend in the language they speak and understand. That’s the only way they will give you an audience and an opportunity to get your proposed solutions into their heads. 

What is the best way to highlight their challenges?

How do you bring up their issues without making them feel bad?

It is all in the language and how you speak it.

It’s crucial to your success as a copywriter that your audience knows you understand how they feel and that you see them and their pain. And you can only do this by expressing yourself as someone who does. This approach gives them confidence in you and whatever product or service you offer as solutions to their needs. 

In speaking your buyers’ language, as much as possible, you want to avoid using words that shift blame to your audience and their decisions, as this might trigger them. Let go of the idea of perfection for now and allow them to take your empathy all in. 

2. Ask more questions

Want to be and sound more empathic in your writing?

Ask open questions. 

Use them as invitations to your audience to leave comments expressing themselves and their feelings. 

Open questions help you understand what is happening or what the person thinks. The questions you ask your audience will help you direct future content to address their answers to those questions. And when they leave answers, accept their interpretation and recognize their emotions, restate the issue for more understanding, and be non-judgmental. 

Keep your questions simple. You can ask your audience questions like:

What makes you happy?

What can I do to improve the quality of your life?

What are your business or personal priorities, fears, and expectations?

Your audience knows what they want, and asking them will help you communicate solutions better. 

3. Be conversational 

The ability to communicate and converse with your audience will be a game-changer in your quest to become a more empathic copywriter. Being a conversational copywriter will require you to be an active listener first. It also requires you to gather enough information from your audience. 

But, hey, I must warn you—lots of patience is required since not everyone will open up for a conversation at the beginning. You shouldn’t expect a reply to every question or conversation starter. 

Another way to keep your conversation going is to bring up similar cases or stories which your audience can relate with. This gives them a guarantee that you understand what they are saying. 

As much as you can, keep your sentences short and easy to understand. 

 4. Be authentic 

Your readers look for a reason to connect with you—and genuineness, originality, and authenticity do this for you. 

Being authentic in writing is much easier than people think. It’s all about showing up as your true self. As a writer, it’s creating work that is real. You’re not there to impress the reader but to form meaningful connections and offer value in the way only you can. 

Through authentic writing, your audience finds answers and extends their thinking. One of the ways you can improve your empathy in copywriting is by increasing your knowledge; reading books on how to relate with your audience, and creating personas that will help you step out of yourself to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.  

As much as you want to show up as your authentic self, remember that your reader comes first.