Win by Focusing on People With Interest but Not Buying

[00:00:00] Divyansh Shukla: Hello everyone. 

[00:00:09] Welcome to ConvEx ’23, VWO’s annual virtual summit for growth and experimentation professionals. My name is Divyansh and I’m a marketing manager at VWO. 

[00:00:20] Thousands of brands across the globe use VWO as their experimentation platform to run A/B tests on their website, apps, and products. I’m excited to host the third workshop at ConvEx 2023 with Rishi Rawat.

[00:00:34] Hey Rishi, I invite you on stage please.

[00:00:40] Rishi Rawat: Hi, Divyansh. Thank you for inviting me. I’m very excited to share everything that I’ve learned over the last 13 years. This is going to be a fun, action packed session. 

[00:00:52] Divyansh Shukla: Awesome. Awesome. Let’s start then. I’ll jp off the stage and I’ll be there at the back to support your Rishi. Over to you. You can share the screen. 

[00:01:01] Rishi Rawat: What’s going to happen, guys? This is going to be interactive. Kind of like a chef in the kitchen. I’m going to be doing a bunch of things. So, I apologize if I drop some details. But, I want to quickly go through and just first talk about our philosophy of how we think about conversion optimization.

[00:01:22] Essentially I’m a copywriter. So, I’m really thinking about storytelling and I’m going to explain two fundamental aspects of how we think about storytelling. Number one is how do we target the right audience? And number two is how do we tell them the story that gets them to buy? And then once we’ve discussed that, I will show you examples.

[00:01:44] We will go through a group exercise together as well. So let’s quickly first kind of talk about how do we look at the world? Now there are hundreds and dozens of ways in which you can segment your audience. To me, I’m a very simple minded person. I believe that there’s only one audience that really matters and this is people who are leaning in with interest. 

[00:02:11] So if you have a website and if you can identify people who are leaning in with interest, this to me is where all of your revenue opportunity is. Now, this audience can be further subdivided into two groups. They can be divided into people who buy, and then people who don’t buy.

[00:02:31] Now, I’m not concerned about people who are buying, because they’re already buying. I am very interested in people who don’t end up buying. And so this is essentially the group that we’re trying to go after. 

[00:02:44] Now, like I said, forget about people who are buying because they’re already buying and then hyper focus on people who are leaning in with interest, but don’t end up buying.

[00:02:53] We have two challenges. Our first challenge is, how do I know if someone is leaning with interest? Now I’ll show you an example and then of course, second challenge is what do we say? 

[00:03:07] So let’s deal with the first one, which is, we need to draw the attention of these people who are leaning in with interest. 

[00:03:15] So I’m gonna go and show you an example from one of the websites that we worked on. So the user comes to the website, they then from there they go to the product page and I’m just gonna show you the nudges that we’ve added. So we did lots of changes to the page, but I’m just gonna focus on the nudges that we added.

[00:03:37] There’s one nudge over here right below the image, it says the science of skin health. And then if you come lower on the page there’s another nudge over here that we’ve added. It’s a hyperlink. The copy is different. It looks different. It’s designed differently. It’s in a different location. It says explore the science.

[00:03:55] And what happens is that when you click on any one of these and typically we will put 5 or 6 CTAs, call to actions, on the page. In this example or in this experiment, we had just two call to actions and when you click on it, we are showing a really long sales pitch. In this case it’s a long sales pitch. 

[00:04:11] It doesn’t have to be a long sales pitch, but it’s a sales pitch. And it’s been surgically designed to have a conversation with people who are leaning in with interest. And now what the consumer doesn’t know is that, while this is the winning variant what we tested on the back end were 10 different flavors of the sales pitch, nine of which failed. 

[00:04:36] So we kept on tweaking it till we got to the winning combination. So essentially the architecture that we have is very straightforward. We place these call to actions on the page and then when you click on it we show the sales pitch. So I’m essentially as an experimenter, I’m optimizing for two things. Number one is I’m saying what percentage of people discovered my call to action. If it’s too low, then that’s a problem. 

[00:05:01] So I need to add more call to actions. I need to make these call to actions more visible and then the second part of the puzzle is, how did people respond to that sales pitch? Did it have a meaningful impact on conversion rates or not? 

[00:05:15] So that is essentially the thing that I’m focused on. So we’ve shown you that each example, let me just come here. This was a winning experiment. So we had a 19% improvement in conversion rates. We did a similar exam experiment. All of the experiments that we run are basically unlike other CROs that do all kinds of experiments.

[00:05:42] I’m a one trick pony. I do the exact same experiment over and over again, doesn’t matter what the brand is. So this other experiment was for a golf brand and we did a similar experiment. 

[00:05:53] Obviously the sales pitch is different. Obviously the CTA locations and the copy around the CTAs are different but the outcome was we had a 26% improvement here.

[00:06:04] And this is not just for these two, you might say, well, this might work for a cosmetic brand, it might work for a golf brand but the truth is it works for a whole bunch of clients. 

[00:06:16] I have never seen an exception where it doesn’t work principally. It may not work because the sales pitch was weak that happens all the time but there’s nothing fundamental about the kind of product that you’re selling that prevents you from running this type of experiment. 

[00:06:30] So it works with pet products. We’ve certainly got lots of experience there. Consumer electronics, lots of experience there. Athletic gear, back pain solutions, food items. There’s really no end to it. 

[00:06:45] So guys we’re going to actually play a few games. If you guys can see my screen, what I’ve done is, I’ve just randomly selected a website. I’ve selected their product page and I’ve taken a screenshot of that product page.

[00:07:01] So we talked about these two problems that we have or two obstacles we have or two objectives we have. The first one is how do I target people who are leaning in with interest? 

[00:07:13] So what I mean is that I don’t want to target someone who just comes to the product page. I’m trying to target people who are deeper than that, who are leaning in with interest.

[00:07:22] So my first exercise for everyone is, and I’ll show you what you’re supposed to do. If you scroll higher, you’ll see we’ve got these dots and I think everyone should be able to move these dots? Let me see. 

[00:07:38] Divyansh, can you see if you’re able, oh, there we go.

[00:07:40] People are able to move it. Wonderful. Wonderful. What I want you to do is I want you to start placing the dots across the page. It’s an entire mobile page and I want you to start placing the dots at locations that you think would be good locations to grab the attention of someone who is leaning in with interest.

[00:08:04] So don’t just go to the top of the page, look at the mid of the page, look at the lower half of the page. There are multiple areas, for example, you might want to place some dots above the formulations because you might say, hey, someone who’s reading the formulation content clearly is an example of someone who’s leaning in with interest.

[00:08:29] So I’ll let you guys decide this. There’s no right and wrong answer. But I do want to see what kind of locations we as a group can come up with. So I’ll give you guys like a couple of seconds to figure out what those hotspots might be.

[00:08:44] Now remember, we’re looking for locations where there is some negative space for me to add a link or a button or a stuff like that.

[00:08:53] So if you were to place a dot on top of the review count, then I don’t know where we’ll fit our call to action. So approximate location is fine and then we can discuss it. 

[00:09:24] I think that should be good, I think we’ve got it. Okay, let’s go through this because you guys are obviously very good marketers because I think a lot of you guys have picked some very, very high visibility locations which is exactly what we’re trying to do. 

[00:09:58] One of the very prominent locations we select is the product image gallery, which is great pick over here. We also are very focused on this part above the add to cart. I see that some people have even selected the add to cart area, which is again, a super hot spot for the consumer. Very good call. I like even the location right below the add to cart.

[00:10:24] That’s also a nice location because we have these four check marks. We can easily add a fifth check mark in the center that says, what makes us different? How are we different? How did we succeed when everyone else failed? 

[00:10:38] I love the fact that some people are selecting the meet real users images because this is where the skepticism comes in like oh, is this like a typical example or is this like some skepticism that comes in. So it’s good location. Great pick! What is spot cream is also a really good location for these call to actions.

[00:11:01] When you go into the ingredients, that is also a pretty good location. That’s great. I’m really happy to see how people have selected the how and why it works. It totally makes sense, right? Someone who is looking at how and why it works is someone who is curious to understand how it works and this is a great place for us to talk about how we are different as a company. 

[00:11:24] Three simple steps again, good locations. This comparison table is a great, really good spot. Now, of course the risk is, it’s much lower on the page. So what happens is that we’re not just trying to, maybe some of you just pick one location.

[00:11:40] The reality is that when we run an experiment, we are picking multiple locations and the idea is some people scroll very fast, they might miss the nudge that we placed on the product image gallery. They might miss it around the add to cart button. So we want them to be able to see it lower on the page.

[00:12:03] So having multiple call to actions is a clever way to maximize the discovery rate. So I think you guys have done a pretty damn, pretty good job. I’m very happy with what you’ve done. So I think you’ve mastered the placement of the CTAs. 

[00:12:20] Now, comes the fun part. Now I’m going to ask you guys a couple of questions.

[00:12:24] So some of you have placed multiple CTAs. Obviously you’ve placed these CTAs in locations that you believe are high visibility location. We’ve run these experiments at least a hundred times now. So I know what the overall discovery rate is.

[00:12:40] My next assignment for you is to take those same dots that you have. Don’t take the dots away from the image, but the dots that are there higher on the page, take them and place them around the percentage nbers that you think represent. When we run this experiment and we track for people that clicked on his call to actions, what kind of a discovery rate, like what percentage of people will click on any one of them, not all of them, just any one of them.

[00:13:08] What is your estimation? 

[00:13:10] Alright. Looks like everyone’s casted their vote. So I think we’re ready. I’m not an expert in Miro to know how to compute this. I think there is a way to do it, but from the votes that I am seeing, it looks like 20%. Basically people are saying that it’s going to be at least 20%. If not higher, that seems to be the majority of votes.

[00:13:51] I’ll share with you guys something very interesting. We’ve run this experiment, I would say, at least 200 times and I’m being conservative. We have almost never seen a click rate of over 10%. Now we do have different techniques to actually increase it quite a bit to 15%, 18% even.

[00:14:16] But the the call to action technique, we’ve almost never seen more than 10% and the reason I’m sharing this is because when we go to CEOs or we go to marketing team and we say, look, we are placing these call to actions, their number one response is, dude, too many call to actions, it’s too prominent. 

[00:14:36] It’s taking too much attention away and the reality is, as I learned from my CRO hero Bryan Eisenberg is that online shoppers are like beagles on steroids and they’re literally not paying attention. We think they are, we think that the person who’s on the Musely page is like intently reading. The reality is that they’re not so their attention is dispersed across the page. Some people come they look at one or two images then they immediately get distracted and they want to look at reviews and they want to then come back up. The way they read the content is also non predictable.

[00:15:14] Some people like to see the images, then they’ll scroll down. They’re looking to see if there’s video content because they like video content. Then after watching the video, they go to the reviews. Someone else might come and the first thing they do is they go down to the reviews. Someone else might come and the first thing they’re doing is they’re looking at focusing on the price area because they want to understand, like, why would I spend $50 or $60, whatever. So different people have different anxieties and so they consume content very differently. So they’re only noticing a part of the page.

[00:15:44] So this is the reason why, as marketers, we feel like, oh my God, why aren’t more people discovering it? Well, that’s because when we create the page and we are looking at the page, we’re giving it our full attention. The shopper is not giving their full attention and so this is the reason why the discovery rate is all never as high. 

[00:16:08] Another thing I’ll share with you and this is not a poll but this is something that we do, is that, a lot of you are going to look at this for example, and say, oh my God, these are so many call to actions.

[00:16:23] So what we do guys, is we set them up. We set all of the call to actions, they’re all part of the same CSS. We use JavaScript code for this and what we do is we say, if someone clicks on any one call to action and if they see our sales pitch, we have a five second timer and if they click on the call to action they expose our sales pitch.

[00:16:44] They start seeing our sales pitch and they start reading it which the only way for us to measure someone actually reading it is, to use a timer and we say, if it’s been five seconds, then what we do is when they close out the popup, the light box, we make all of the other call to actions invisible. And so this way what happens is that we are minimizing or eliminating the probability or the possibility that someone came to product, saw the image gallery, saw the first call to action, clicked on it, saw our sales pitch, read it, closed out of it and then came lower and then saw another call to action over here and clicked in it and saw the same sales page. 

[00:17:24] That’s a really bad user experience and so in order to eliminate that we set it up as conditional elements. 

[00:17:32] So we’ve already addressed one part of the puzzle, 50% of the puzzle, which is how do we create call to actions and place call to actions across the funnel.

[00:17:42] Now remember, in this example, we are doing it on the page, but this can also be applied across the funnel. So that part has been solved. Now let’s talk about, okay, what happens when the user clicks on the call to action and this is really where our sales pitch comes in. So how do we write a sales pitch?

[00:18:06] How do I know what to focus on? How do I know what my building blocks are? So what I’m going to do is first, I’m going to tell you what the building blocks are and then I’m going to actually show you an example. 

[00:18:15] This is an experiment that we ran for a client and this was the winning variant and I’ll explain to you why we chose the words that we chose. And then I’m going to give you guys some exercises. So there are nine components. So the way to think about it is that the shopper is traveling the internet. They are being bombarded with ads. They are being bombarded with brands saying that we have the best product. We have the best prices.

[00:18:43] We have the best performance and so it’s very hard for the consumer to evaluate what product is right for them because everyone claims to be the right product. So what has happened is that at a subconscious level, our brains have developed these shortcuts, these heuristics to evaluate what pitches to reject very quickly and what sales pitches to focus on.

[00:19:10] So there are nine components to it. The first one is shoppers are skeptical of too good to be true. So what that means is that if your sales pitch, I use the word sales pitch but hopefully you guys understand what I mean by that. If your sales pitch is describing a product in a way that is unbelievable.

[00:19:30] So if you are for example, if you do conversion optimization and you are making a claim to client that hey, every experiment we run, we’re able to improve conversion rates by 40% or 50%, that is a little too good to be true and that’s going to backfire. So pay attention to things that can be seen as too good to be true.

[00:19:50] This is a really important one. We find expertise sexy. We’re living in a very hyper specialized world and consumers are not looking to buy running shoes from a company that also makes tractors. We want to buy a running shoes from a company that is devoted itself to making the world’s best running shoes, not fashion shoes, not sneakers, not slippers.

[00:20:15] Literally just running shoes. So this whole idea of expertise and you’ll see in the example that I’m going to show you how we play up on this whole expertise idea. This is something about the human spirit. We are drawn to people who overcome obstacles, so I don’t want to just know that you are an expert. 

[00:20:36] I want to know that you have overcome challenges to get to that stage of expertise because it becomes more relatable, more believable. 

[00:20:46] We are fascinated by surprising details. So how can we educate while we are trying to sell a pair of shoes or we’re selling a vacu cleaner, whatever it is, but how do we use that as an opportunity to also educate the people that we’re trying to sell to?

[00:21:06] Education is a very powerful conversion technique because it does a bunch of things. It gives people value. So the feeling of reciprocity where you’ve got something for free that you didn’t expect to get. So that is important. It also demonstrates expertise. The only people that are able to teach that are people who have mastered the subject themselves.

[00:21:26] So this is another component that we try to use. We are visual animals. 50% of our brain, our entire occipital cortex is focused on image processing. So it’s a very fundamental part of how we learn. And so how do we write our sales pitch or how do we present our sales pitch in a way that evokes images or mental images in the mind of the reader.

[00:21:53] This is the most important one. Ultimately, if I construct the most compelling sales pitch in the world, but I don’t give you the path to fire what you were doing and hire what I’m proposing, then you won’t take that action. So just demonstrating expertise is not good enough if we’re trying to get people to change their behavior.

[00:22:14] So how do we incorporate that? So the sales pitch or the presentation has to incorporate that. You know, people don’t want to buy a product that could be used by everyone. This is why we don’t like to use language, like if it’s a sports product, we don’t want to say like amateurs and professionals everyone loves it because by trying to appeal to everyone, we’re not really appealing to any one specific audience.

[00:22:41] So the reader wants to know that you are speaking specifically to them, that you are thinking specifically of them and there’s a very specific technique for making that happen. 

[00:22:54] Human beings want to have tribal identities. Up until 10,000 years ago, we lived in small tribal groups and our brains have been wired for that kind of tribal thinking and so we want to feel like we’re part of a group. So how do we incorporate that into our storytelling? And I’ll show you an example. 

[00:23:13] And then finally, we must resolve their negative thoughts and so at the end of the day, if the user reads the entire sales pitch and they had some questions that came to them at the start of the sales pitch, they’ve got to the bottom of the sales pitch and that question is still unanswered.

[00:23:32] Guess what happens? They’re not going to buy. So those are the nine fundamental building blocks that we use now. Let’s just jump into that experiment that we ran for this client that won. 

[00:23:45] I’ll explain to you what we did. So we place the call to actions on the product page and then when you clicked on any one of the call to actions, if you’re on mobile, this appeared as a full screen model. 

[00:23:58] If you’re on desktop it took two thirds of the page width. So you could still see the page in the background and essentially the winning variant was this one.

[00:24:09] So the first thing we did was we placed a video right at top of the model and there’s a bit of special code that we added. It’s not just the video because this video was also available on their product page. So what we did was we added conditional code where we said that if the video was not played and if someone clicks on a call to action and opens the light box, then show them that video.

[00:24:38] However, if the video was played on the product page and if they click on the call to action in the model, the video was hidden. So we are basically eliminating the probability or the possibility that someone is going to see the same video twice. 

[00:24:53] Then it says over here, two worlds. So this is playing on that whole tribal identity thing we just talked about. People who are playing golf and this product specifically is for casual golfers, certainly not for professionals. So we wanted to draw a distinction between a casual golfer and a professional golfer or people that spend a lot of money in golf gear vs people that are kind of starting out, which is the audience that this brand is going after.

[00:25:20] Now, what’s interesting over here is that the headline intentionally is specific and vague at the same time. It’s specific because it does communicate an idea but it’s vague because we don’t really say what those two words are and this is very intentional because I’m trying to get the reader to be sucked in into my sales pitch because if they stop reading before they get to the sales pitch then there’s the probability of them buying is zero.

[00:25:47] Then it says there are two golf worlds. One is ultra competitive where performance is the only detail that matters. Professional athletes whose bodies have been chiseled to fit their golf clubs operate in the space, but that’s just 0.2% of golfers. 

[00:26:00] So now we are essentially distinguishing a professional player from everyone else and this is very intentional because this is playing on that concept we talked about over here, which is number eight, which is we want to belong. 

[00:26:16] So we’re playing this ‘want to belong’ concept where we’re setting the stage for it. Then there’s the rest of us, again. Rest of us not rest of you guys, but rest of us, because we’re part of that group. People who care about quality and performance, but also don’t want to spend stupid money.

[00:26:32] Don’t want to be stupid with money. So, this is a cost economical golf set that we’re selling. So, you know, people that don’t want to spend a lot of money are economical and so we’re basically saying that we’re part of your tribe and it doesn’t make sense to spend this kind of money. “Stix was made for people like us”, again, playing this whole tribal identity.

[00:26:54] Then we kind of break the flow by adding an image and the reason for this is again, like I said, 50% of mental processing is through images and so by including that image, we are not only breaking the copy. So I don’t want it to look like a wall of text. But also we are by including the image, we are essentially communicating what the product looks like and just making it sexy.

[00:27:20] “Misen knives are a favorite of mine I will prep all day with those knives, but who wants to even make a salad with an ikea knife I’m, not a professional chef, but I appreciate quality tools.” So here we are using an analogy because Misen knives is a knife brand and whereas the brand is selling golf clubs.

[00:27:41] So why the heck are we talking about knives? Well, we’re doing it because the person that is buying that golf club probably doesn’t have a lot of experience buying golf equipment. But they do have a lot of experience with other types of purchases and one of the common purchases that people are can relate to is a knife.

[00:28:00] So we’re using the analogy which is a visualization technique number five over here to kind of evoke a visual.

[00:28:10] Then it says keeping things simple. The sport of golf has become very complicated. Some buyers might assume getting a golf fitting is what their game needs. Trouble is, for most, your swing will lack consistency, which could make the fitting you receive one day wrong the next time you play golf.

[00:28:29] So one of the things that one of the negative thoughts that the consumer has is that we all know that I can walk up to a Dick’s Sporting Goods or I can go to a golf sports store and actually buy a golf set there and a lot of these golf stores have fitting. Where they’ll actually have a pro who’s helping you figure out what golf club to buy.

[00:28:49] Well, you don’t have that online. So we know that’s a negative thought, number nine of negative thoughts. So we know it’s a negative thought in the mind of the buyer. So we’re addressing that up front so that we can bust that objection and then in order to reinforce that, we are using another analogy. It says the eyeglass industry built a monopoly by telling us we needed to see an optometrist and a glasses specialist, then Warby Parker came along.

[00:29:18] So here, what we’re trying to basically say is that no, you don’t have to go to the store, and you don’t have to talk to a pro, you don’t have to get fitted and, of course, if we were to just say that, that’s not believable cause they’re like, of course you would say that you’re an online retailer.

[00:29:33] Of course you’re going to tell me I don’t have to go to the store. So the reason why we’re using this analogy of Warby Parker here is because this is something most consumers can relate to, and so we’re using that as a way to make a point. 

[00:29:47] We’ve thought a lot about club fitting. So again, demonstration of expertise. Intentionally put this here so that we are able to communicate to the buyer that we are experts. We took a risk here’s something you’ve noticed some brands seem to be everywhere. They seem to sponsor pro events, TV commercials, and are in retail stores. How do these brands end up with so much visibility?

[00:30:10] It’s called advertising. One is forced to wonder who’s paying for this advertising. 

[00:30:14] So again, one of the vulnerabilities that an online only brand has is that there are lots of golf brands that over the last 50 years, 100 years, have built very strong retail presence. And the consumer is thinking “hey, I see ads for that brand all the time they must be good. Why else would they be advertising?” 

[00:30:37] So in order to bust that objection, we are essentially using this statement over here. So it’s a negative thought, I’m busting it by placing this statement over here. And here what I’m basically saying is that who’s paying for this advertising?

[00:30:50] It’s an open ended question and that makes the reader feel like “oh, they’re probably paying for it.” So to be fair 20 years ago. So let’s ignore this one and it’s not like we didn’t flirt with the idea. We’ll ignore this as well here. We’re showing some social proof.

[00:31:04] So what I’m going to show you guys is how we constructed, it’s a pretty long sales pitch. So I don’t want to go through the entire thing, but what it’s doing is it is essentially using those nine components that we have for how we construct the sales pitch in order to construct the sales pitch. 

[00:31:25] So I’m going to give you guys an exercise where we will actually use these nine elements but I want to stop for just one brief second and then go back to the presentation because I want to make sure that those examples, I know it wasn’t a complete example because I didn’t want to spend another 30 minutes going through all of the details but I wanted to emphasize and this Miro board will be made available to you for you to actually go through that entire sales pitch and you will find that it is being built using those nine elements.

[00:32:02] Okay. Let me just go through some of these questions. So let’s see. 

[00:32:06] [Reading audience comments] We experienced 10% rarely only when we run really good emotional connection ads. Otherwise. Okay. Ye that’s right. How many people here know missing knives? I do. Okay. 

[00:32:19] So I guess people are asking, okay, let me see. It makes sense.

[00:32:24] So when you test different copies, is it a rewrite of the entire page or just a section? Okay. So Roc, your question was essentially, do we rewrite the sales pitch? That’s a really good question. So we don’t necessarily rewrite the entire sales pitch. 

[00:32:43] So when we create the sales pitch, we actually have to see when people dropped off. So if people dropped off very early in the sales pitch, then we know that the sales pitch is really problematic. So we work on the opening. If they dropped off at the midpoint, then we actually try to see what point were we trying to make in the midpoint.

[00:33:06] So to answer your question, we don’t rewrite the sales pitch. We sometimes will focus on different elements. So for example, in this case for the golf club, maybe the problem is that the sales pitch is too long. So if the experiment failed, I would come up with a much shorter sales pitch or if I’m talking about two or three key details or emphasizing, remember we talked about those nine elements.

[00:33:33] So if I picked one or two elements from there and really emphasized on that. Let’s say for example, I emphasized on price. Well, if the experiment fails, then that could suggest it’s not necessary, but it could suggest that people are not as concerned about prices I was assuming. So in that case, I would switch my focus of the sales pitch and I would say, okay, let’s focus on demonstration of expertise, which is number two in our tactic list.

[00:34:00] So we would just move it around based on how the test performs. What we typically do guys is that we actually construct a whole bunch of sales pitches before we even launch the experiment, because we know what all the variables are. It’s not like there’s an infinite number of variables. So that’s the explanation for it. 

[00:34:24] Doesn’t this expect a lot of pre-inscribed notion and knowledge users and they know certain brands and they have a good reading skills to decide what the content? 

[00:34:34] So Udit, to answer your question so what we do is in this specific example, the core audience that we are selling to are people that have some knowledge about golf, they probably were playing golf a few years ago and have stopped playing golf and are looking for an inexpensive set.

[00:34:58] Typically what we do Udit is we come up with different sales pitches, depending on the awareness level of the buyer. So it still uses the same nine tactics. 

[00:35:09] So you’re absolutely right. I mean there’s no one formula for how to construct a sales pitch. I’m just showing you one winning variant. So it is recommended to write from a perspective where the buyer’s awareness level is not super high. 

[00:35:30] So when you say shoppers are skeptical of too good to be true, how would you avoid that without devaluing the brand of the product? Ye that’s a great, great question Douglas.

[00:35:38] So what we do is, when we start doing the exercises, what you’ll find is that the “too good to be true” essentially happens once we write the sales pitch. We look at the statements that we’re making. So for example, if we make a statement that says, we make the best running shoes in the world.

[00:36:03] Well, I would look at that statement and I would say, what’s the evidence that we make the best running shoes? How are we making this claim? And so I would give it some treatment based on that statement, but I won’t do it preemptively. I only do it after the sales pitch is being created. So “too good to be true” is something we take care of after we’ve constructed. So we do the exercises, we’ll cover it. 

[00:36:26] I think I’ve addressed everyone. I know there were lots of comments that came in. I’m so sorry guys. So people were talking about Mason knives. So very good point guys. Many people have not heard about it.

[00:36:42] That Mason knife example specifically came from the founder of the brand that we were running the experiment for so we use that example, but it’s very possible. So this is actually interesting, right? So there’s a reason why we use the word Mason Knives. 

[00:36:57] Number one is that the name automatically conveys what the product does so I wouldn’t have used a brand name where the person doesn’t even know what product we’re talking about ultimately we’re trying to use an example of a knife brand. So that’s why we use that example. But you would be very correct in coming to me and saying hey Rishi, can we use another example or can we use a completely different analogy? That would be a very valid point and I would not have any pushback on that. It’s just that for that experiment we used the Mason knife example.

[00:37:29] And of course, there were many components of the copy. We don’t know if the Mason Knife might have been hurting sales. We don’t even know because people were confused by it. We just know that the overall combination one. So it’s a very valid point that should we use examples that most people can relate to. 

[00:37:48] Sometimes you want to use an example that is a little aspirational because even though the user doesn’t understand the brand you’re talking about, they can through our language, figure out it’s a high performing knife and sometimes that’s good enough, but it is reviewed on a case by case basis. 

[00:38:07] Divyansh Shukla: Rishi, you can take one last question and move ahead in your presentation. I see a question from Rob and then we can move forward. 

[00:38:14] Rishi Rawat: Okay, let’s quickly do that. Is there a question on the screen? 

[00:38:20] Divyansh Shukla: Let me just show it on stage.

[00:38:22] Rishi Rawat: Okay, thank you. Which tool are you analyzing in drop-offs? So we use VWO for all of our testing. We actually write custom code within VWO within the test setup and what happens is in that example I showed you where I showed you all the headlines. So we actually automatically have a mechanism where our custom code tracks for which headline the users scroll to.

[00:38:53] So if we had five headlines and if people scroll to the third headline and they dropped off from third headline, we actually can track for that. So we are tracking it based on the headlines that we had. So all of it is done automatically. 

[00:39:07] All right. I’m going to now continue with this because I don’t want to miss out on the exercise.

[00:39:15] This is where you guys are going to now have to participate. And I’ll guide you guys through it. So we’ve got these nine elements. We’re going to actually forget about “too good to be true”. 

[00:39:29] What I want you guys to do is on your browser and I think Divyansh has the link for it but if you guys can go back to the spot clean product page and I’ll give you guys like five minutes to study that page and when you’re studying that page, I want you to think about these nine elements that we’re talking about and ignore the “too good to be true” for now. 

[00:39:54] But I want you to read what the product is all about and what they’re trying to pitch in and stuff like that and on a sheet of paper offline or whatever it is just write down some comments on some of your thoughts some of your ideas that you have.

[00:40:10] This is a little complicated I know that many of you are not prepared for this. Sorry, but I think it’ll be a fun exercise. So like for example, how would we, and you can make up stuff by the way. So don’t worry about what’s true for this brand or not. 

[00:40:23] This is just an exercise, but imagine if you and I were working together on improving the conversion rates or the sales of this product and we were trying to construct a sales pitch. I want to just see some ideas for how would we communicate this idea of, we overcame obstacles. 

[00:40:46] So one simple idea here is that we can talk about you know, we were trying to go through these formulations and we found a lot of the formulations didn’t work and then we eventually found a formulation that worked perfectly fine and that’s when sales took off or whatever it is. We had a breakthrough. 

[00:41:04] That would be one example. Of course. I don’t know if this is true or not but that’s not the point. The idea is to give you practice on how to use these different nine tactics, so ignore “Shoppers are skeptical of too good to be true”.

[00:41:18] I don’t think it’s relevant for now. What I’d like to do is give you like maybe four or five minutes to go through the product page. 

[00:41:25] Divyansh, can you share that url with everyone in the group? 

[00:41:31] Divyansh Shukla: Yes Rishi, we have already shared it. 

[00:41:33] Rishi Rawat: Awesome, awesome. Ye if you guys can spend five minutes reading this page, open up all of these tabs and read some of the content and just kind of like make some notes based on the Miro board for those nine elements and how would you shape? Like just write a sentence or two don’t post it on the Miro board. Do it offline because some of the statements that you might use, you might be like, Oh, this doesn’t sound good. I don’t like it. So do it offline and then once you’re done with that, we can then start posting on the Miro board and see what kind of ideas we’ve come up with as a group if that makes sense. So I’ll give everyone five minutes and we’ll revisit.

[00:42:21] And again do post questions in the comment section of any of these nine tactics you’re unclear about. So for example, I should share this with you. This is a easy one. Number four surprising details. You know what you need to do is you need to go to Google and on Google, you need to search for like trivia or facts or some research about what is this product? Dark spot removal? Like why do we get dark spots? 

[00:42:50] Or things like that, you’re looking specifically for fascinating details that are both easy to understand, but also unique. Because if it’s something that everyone who has dark spots is aware of then it’s not very interesting.

[00:43:06] If it’s something that is so unique and esoteric that is so convoluted that it doesn’t make sense to them, then it’s not going to have the effect either but use Google for this one. “Visual animals”, you know, these guys already have a ton of images but what I want you to think about is using copy.

[00:43:24] If you look at the analogies example that we use for that golf brand, analogy is a great way to create a visual using words. So, think of analogies over there. This is a really tough one. So really think about, how would I convince someone to actually stop what they’re doing?

[00:43:50] So people might be mostly ignoring their dark spots because they’re like, Oh, whatever. I don’t know. I’m too busy. I can’t fix it. Of course it’s a problem because they’re on the website in the first place. So how would I communicate to them to stop it? And then how would we write copy? And again, I’m just looking for a sentence, one sentence.

[00:44:08] How would I write it in a way? This is actually a very interesting one. I should actually spend a minute exploring this. So ‘love personalized experiences’. There are two things that you’re doing over here. The first thing is you are making guesses about the buyer. You’re making obvious guesses about the buyer.

[00:44:27] One very obvious guess is that they’re looking for a dark spot removal solution, but you’re also making creative guesses. I’ll give you an example of a creative guess. A creative guess is that they are self conscious about their dark spots or a creative guess could even be that someone in their trusted circle has said something to them about dark spot that is really emotionally affected them or they’re seeing an increase in dark spots, right?

[00:44:57] I don’t know if this is 100% correct. This is why it’s called a creative guess. But I’m actually making a guess and so then you can actually create copy. You can add a sentence you can say something like, here’s an example, you can say having a dark spot is bad enough. When you start noticing that dark spots are increasing year over year, that’s alarming.

[00:45:21] That’s a great example of a personalized experience because it has been written in a way where the reader is reading this and saying, “Oh my God, this is exactly what’s going on with me. How do these guys know it?” 

[00:45:35] And then, this want to belong idea. So this is the way to think about this, you can talk about, this comes from the brand’s perspective so you can basically say our founder had eight spots or we can say that, we think it’s a shame that there are so many cosmetic solutions to look beautiful but there’s no one has really focused on solving the dark spot problem we can say something like only other people that have dark spots can understand what it feels like to have a dark spot and that again, creates that whole tribal feeling because if I have a dark spot but my wife doesn’t have it, I can complain about it but she doesn’t have a dark spot. She won’t relate to me. 

[00:46:28] But if I can meet someone else who’s struggling with the same thing it creates that connection. So anyway, I’ll give you guys five minutes to note down.

[00:46:36] Remember this is not a university level exam. It doesn’t matter if you come up with a snippet that can be put in some other section, it doesn’t matter. I just want to see your ideas but what you need to do is study the product page. See what you come up with. Let’s give it five minutes and let’s then discuss some of the insights.

[00:46:54] So if you can, Divyansh just start the music, maybe.

[00:47:18] All right, guys. So, let me just go ahead and again share my screen. I’m pretty sure that people have questions about these nine tactics and they might not have the specific answers. I should actually stop sharing my screen because I want to see your comments, but let me just come here engage.

[00:47:45] Did everyone have a chance to at least note down one or two sentences, even if it’s a made up sentence for the nine tactics. If you can just tell me in chat if you wrote them because what I’m going to do next is actually have you share some of those on the Miro board as well.

[00:48:05] So if you can just, the people who have got a few sentences that you’ve created for maybe for a few of the tactics, you don’t have to make them for all. If you can just write maybe in chat just tell me if you’ve got ideas or if you’ve noted down your ideas or if you still need more time.

[00:48:29] Cool. Hannah’s got a few. That’s great. Anyone else has any ideas noted down? Again, just need a confirmation at this point that the ideas have been noted down. 

[00:48:41] What I wanted to do guys is, I’m seeing a few people have written and guys look some of you might just be in the observing mode.

[00:48:51] Totally fine. There’s no rules for these things. What I’m going to do next is I’m going to go ahead and share my Miro board. So everyone can see what’s going on. And what I would recommend is in the Miro board itself. So I don’t know if you guys can see this, but on the left column of the Miro board, there are, if you go down to the one, two, three, fourth element, there’s a sticky note element.

[00:49:16] I think there’s a short code for it and as well, if you can just click on that sticky note element and then drag and drop it to let me actually zoom out a little bit. So where are we? Okay, so and then place it to the tactic and just copy paste your response or your copy snippet into that.

[00:49:39] I think it’d be very interesting for us to actually review that as a group. Remember when I’m writing copy, we go through dozens of variations and most of the time my team looks at the copy I’ve written and says, please rework it. There’s no right and wrong answer.

[00:49:59] Typographical mistakes doesn’t matter if some of the assumptions you’re making are inaccurate. It doesn’t matter. The idea is just to see how would we use these eight tactics? I mean, forget about too good to be true, right? So how do we, like, how do we communicate expertise after understanding the page?

[00:50:22] How would I tell a buyer if I was creating an ad and I wanted to communicate to them that we are experts in this problem, how would I communicate expertise? Right. 

[00:50:36] You know, we know that people are drawn to people who overcome obstacles. What could be an example of an obstacle that we encountered as a company that we overcame?

[00:50:52] A simple one is, we tested a whole bunch of formulations over the last five years and we weren’t able to find a solution. We almost gave up and then we found a formulation that worked. So that’s one example. 

[00:51:07] So, I don’t want to put anyone on the spot, but I am going to like maybe go through it. I’m very excited. I feel this is the happiest day of my life because I’m actually getting to see people actually use these tactics and I’m really enjoying this.

[00:51:23] This is lovely. I really like this. I don’t know who posted this one. “20 plus dermatologists working together to shine light on dark spots.” 

[00:51:32] Wonderful, wonderful. Really, really good. By the way, ChatGPT can also be a very interesting tool as well. You can write a snippet and then go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I want to make this look like an expert or I’m an expert. How would I do it? Very good. 

[00:51:48] Our dark spot remover is sourced from expert providers and endorsed by board certified dermatologist ensuring the exceptional quality is exactly right. That is a great example of expertise. It communicates expertise. Time research, size of research team. That’s exactly right. That’s really good. 

[00:52:08] What else do we have? We root for people that overcome obstacles. How would we communicate obstacles? By the way, if some of you have ideas for expertise and you want to post it after I’ve read it. That’s fine. We can go back to it. 

[00:52:23] Are peels, laser treatments and creams not delivering the results you desire.

[00:52:28] Our Musely prescription offers a 10x more affordable solution as doctor visits and treatments come at significantly lower cost. 

[00:52:40] Well, I see what you’re doing here and I would say, we’re not really communicating. So I’ll show you, how I would approach this real quick if I can. 

[00:53:00] Okay. So, we realized that going to the doctor wasn’t a good solution. So we locked ourselves in our lab. I’m just going to make this a little bigger. There were times when we didn’t think this was possible and then, we discoverd (just making this up) prototype.

[00:54:14] This would be an example where we are talking about a problem. The fact that going to the doctors is not a solution and then we are essentially talking about our own journey and we’re talking about a struggle that we had in our journey and then we actually. So it says and then we discovered prototype number 47.

[00:54:34] You don’t need to be a celebrity to get clear skin. Nothing is a secret in this day and age. This is a good example. But again, the idea here is to, I understand that this is not an easy exercise. So maybe something for you guys to think about. But the idea is to not identify a problem, but actually talk about how we overcame that obstacle, how we overcame a certain obstacle.

[00:55:03] This is one of the things that we actually get from clients by doing research. We actually ask them these questions, what materials did you test or how many prototypes did you go through? Or tell us about a setback that you had in the product development process. It could be a budget setback, it could be a timeline setback, it could even be a failed launch where you launch the product and you had massive number of returns and then you actually overcame that challenge by reformulating.

[00:55:32] So those are all examples. Was anyone able to find interesting facts about dark spots in a Google search. This is one of the very common things that we like to use in the copy. It breaks up the copy, but it also is educating the buyer about something that they simply didn’t know.

[00:55:55] That again, it indirectly demonstrates expertise because a teacher is a master in the subject, right? Okay, let me look at this one over here. It says need motivation and break habits. Let me read this. So how many other OTC creams have you tried? Are you tired of it? Buy ours because we guarantee that’s very good.

[00:56:15] That’s very good. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah. So you’ve added even some urgency into it. That’s really good. I really like that. So this one is a really good one because you are essentially acknowledging that, people are going to flirt with buying this product, eventually not buy this product and continue using that cream that they have at home or have no cream and continue struggling with it.

[00:56:40] So I think that this is great love personal experience. So, okay. So here we are trying to identify, make creative guesses and obvious guesses about the buyer. So you don’t need ultra expensive skin treatments. You can get rid of dark spots with your solution customized just for you. Smile for the camera, flaunt who you are.

[00:57:00] Good. It’s a little generic because the idea is, so I want to actually help you guys like think about this. So here’s a guess I can make about the person. What I can guess about this person is that, they’ve been dealing with it for many years, right?

[00:57:23] This is a really important, this is a creative guess, but it’s often times correct. The reality is that people don’t, especially when it comes to themselves, they actually ignore problems for a long time. So I can reflect that back to them. So, here’s what I’ll do. Did you know that the average person takes seven years to acknowledge that they are suffering from, you can see I’m also the world’s greatest typo mistake maker, suffering from hearing loss. And then you can continue with this you can say, we do this to ourselves, continue ignoring things until it’s too late. Oh, we can just end it over here. 

[00:58:41] Guys, this is actually a really interesting one. What I’ve done here is, I’m using an analogy. So this is using a bunch of tactics, right? So I’m using an analogy over here because they’re selling a dark spot removal product and I’m using the hearing aid example. 

[00:58:54] So I’m seeing that the average person takes seven years to acknowledge that they have a hearing problem before they actually solve the problem and what I’m saying after that is we do this to ourselves by to ignore things.

[00:59:19] This is an example of a personalized experience because as a buyer I’m reading this and I’m thinking to myself. Yes. This is my situation as well. So I’ve made a creative guess that the buyer that we’re trying to sell to is. I see some really good ones over here.

[00:59:38] Our dark spot cream is for real people who may not always feel camera ready. This is great. We want to belong. It burns your face. You know it works. Join us. 

[00:59:48] Yes. Okay. I don’t know how this will work. Three simple steps. Getting a Musely prescription easy. Okay.

[00:59:57] All right. So guys thank you very much for participating. I see a bunch of fresh and great. I know that we had only a limited number of time. I know we’ve gone over. 

[01:00:11] Divyansh, I’m sorry about all these delays. 

[01:00:16] Divyansh Shukla: It was a pure pleasure. 

[01:00:21] Yes, definitely, Rishi.

[01:00:22] It was a pure pleasure to spend those extra minutes on the exercise. I hope it was a pleasure for attendees as well. 

[01:00:30] Please feel free to drop in any queries or doubts or any questions regarding the session. We’re more than happy to answer them right away or you can also share your queries on the call.

[01:00:46] It seems like there are no more questions. Thank you so much Rishi for participating in ConvEx 2023. ConvEx 2023 is filled with more such insightful sessions lined up for day two and day three. 

[01:00:58] So day two is where Rose from Amazon and Benjamin from eBay, and a lot of other influential people will take the stage to share their insights and learnings from the decade long experiences in conversion optimization.

[01:01:14] See you there tomorrow at 11 AM EST, and we’ll be there on day three as well with an exciting event called Spotlight and we’ll take it up from there. 

[01:01:27] Rishi, thank you so much for taking the time out and see you yet again, probably at VWO Webinars. 

[01:01:32] Rishi Rawat: Thank you guys. Thank you Divyansh. Thank you guys for attending. Really good fun. I’m on LinkedIn so drop me comments. I know there’ll be questions. I would love to answer them, but sorry, I tried to cover too much but hopefully some of it made sense. 

[01:01:51] Divyansh Shukla: Definitely. Bye bye Rishi. 

[01:01:54] Rishi Rawat: Thank you guys.