4 Unusual Conversion Copywriting Approaches

I’m your host, Divyansh. I’m a marketing manager at VWO, a full-funnel website experimentation platform. Today, we have a special guest who I feel a lot of people already know or will know after this presentation. Welcome, Eden from Green Light Copy.

Eden Bidani:

That was on mute. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here today.

D:

Yeah. Before starting with the actual discussion, I want to let attendees know that you too can participate in this discussion. Go to Webinar does not allow me to switch on your cameras. but I can switch on your mics. Do share your thoughts on the questions being discussed. Send me a request using a chat or a questions box from the control panel, I will be happy to unmute you.

Eden, take it away.

EB:

I’m so sorry. Okay. So everyone can see my screen. You can see the slides. That’s correct.

Alright. Just double-checking. Okay. Hi, everyone. It’s great to be here.

Fantastic. So a huge thanks again to the team, the whole team of VWO for inviting me to participate. You know, as you would have seen on the sign-up page today’s session, it’s gonna be about 4 unusual copywriting approaches. You can go and try it yourself immediately in order to help you drive private conversion rates.

Now it’s not gonna click across. Okay. So really, really great. Just a little bit about myself, if we haven’t met yet. Hi.

I’m Eden or Evan. Either one is fine. I’m a conversion copywriter. I work with, SASTech and IoT companies with their new customer acquisition. On top of that, I used to work in direct sales and marketing for 5 years to pay the bills while going through university, which was kind of ironic because I was studying anthropology and sociology which is kind of the antithesis of sales and marketing.

And that’s because anthropology is all about learning to see the world from someone else’s point of view. and a fact that anthropology is actually considered unethical and forbidden to consider someone else’s opinion as being inferior or incorrect. While sales and marketing are usually about convincing others that your point of view about your product or service is correct. And the most correct option out of any other products or companies in the marketplace, so pretty much extreme opposites. But what I find really fascinating about this is this brings a unique perspective into the measurement optimization experimentation because a lot of traditional headline sales and marketing often lack a deep layer of empathy and understanding for customers, which is what anthropology teaches.

So what a lot of people in sales and marketing or even Sierra will say led psychology to understand how people think I’m actually a big advocate for learning anthropology instead as it actually teaches you how to be empathetic, how to still achieve your business goals with customer or audience’s best interest at heart. Anyway, back to the session. Copywriting specifically is something that I personally find deeply, deeply fascinating because the words that each use to express the value of a product or service to your audience impact on how the audience actually perceives that product or service. And as a result, that impacts how motivated or encouraged they are to convert. But I’m not here to talk to you today about David Ogilvy or Madman or copywriting formulas like problem education, solution, or attention-interest to layer action. We’re not even gonna talk today about ChatGPT. That could be an entire webinar in itself. Today, we’re actually going to talk about three things. We’re gonna talk about why most copywriting hacks don’t deliver long-term or consistent results.

Sure. A winning experiment or AB test here and there is great, but what does that impact on the user’s journey or the impact on the company’s revenue as a whole, for unusual approaches to copyright a few to try out why they work. And that includes using written examples from some real experiments to help inspire you. So let’s kick off by walking through the three reasons why most copywriting hacks don’t really work. And that’s for 3 key reasons, and I know you’re gonna laugh at these, but they’re so true because first of all, we know hacks are guessing, and guessing isn’t a strategy.

2, because when hacks are used, they’re often deployed without the context of the entire user’s journey. They’re often focusing on one element, one deliver, one step in the user’s journey without studying, writing, or looking at the bigger picture. And 3, because the copywriting hacks aren’t usually optimizing for the right things in the first place. The first thing is that we know we all know deep down in our hearts that guessing is in the strategy. And when we look at testing quick hacked, that’s often what it leads to, guessing.

The problem with guessing is that it’s a gamble. Sometimes we get lucky, but often we don’t. That leads to a negative feedback cycle of ongoing guessing, which ends up producing the perception of the value of what we do as CROs and experimenters to tiny things like making edge cuts, buttons sticky, or button color testing. You know, these hacks can drive results, but they’re also not always to resolve or deliver significant impact or significant outcomes for the client. Might deliver a test win but is it actually having a positive impact on the client, for the client as a whole?

You know, and just as we wouldn’t jump to crafting a hypothesis without looking at the research or data we have on hand, we also shouldn’t jump to using copywriting hacks without first revisiting our research of data and evaluating gifts actually right for us. The second reason. Alright. So it’s catching up. I think this gift is taking a long time to load.

Hang on. There we go. Okay. The second reason why typical copywriting hacks don’t work is because they don’t look at the bigger picture of the entire user journey. We can’t just make changes on a single ad email landing page or web page without considering where the user was coming from, what they were doing, what their state of mind was, what they wanted to learn, do, or achieve as a result of being on this asset or interacting with this asset.

And when I say asset, I mean, email landing page or web page, and we can’t also need to consider where they’re going next. If we don’t take these things into consideration, it can negatively impact revenue or the outcomes of the client. And I’ll give you a small example just to illustrate this. A few years ago I was working with a client helping them optimize their lead gen, lead generation campaigns for solar panel installations. Our goal was to funnel people from the ad, to the landing page, to request, to get a callback from the center that they put their info in the quiz, and then they’d eventually get a callback from someone in the call center.

Now the flow is actually working perfectly Really smooth from add to landing page quiz. Everything seemed to be fine. Conversion rates were super high, and the kind of call centers are getting flooded with leads. Sounds great, until we got a call from the client, who was really annoyed that the leads weren’t picking up their phones, answering the emails that the call sent over sending them. So basically garbage leads.

Whoops. So we were to go back and we revisited the entire flow, but we don’t wanna mess with the ad on the landing page. We’d optimize them to a point where they were working perfectly. But we’re looking at what we could consider changing instead, and we ended up looking at what we might be able to do with the quiz. In the end, we decided that when the leads were prompted to enter their information on the last page of the quiz to collect their results, we added a line of micro-copy.

And the line of microcopy simply said by clicking submit, You understand you’ll receive a callback from a solar panel representative. And as soon as we deployed this, we immediately had a huge drop in commissions on the quiz. but the quality of the leads that came through shot up enormously and the client was happy. Why? Because the leads that were coming through before didn’t have any intent to actually have a conversation.

They just wanted to get their results, but the leads that were coming through, and not only were more interested in getting the results from the quiz, but they also knew that they also expected a callback from, a representative. And they said they had some level of intent or some acknowledgment that they would be continuing the process of potentially buying viable solar panels as a result. So even though previously for the Adelani page, we did all the right things to optimize them, the outcome of that was poor quality leads that were really wasting the client’s time and frustrating calls into stuff. So actually by putting in that line of micro-copy and decreasing the conversion rate, we actually improved the overall outcomes of the client. only against logic, but it actually delivered the desired results. And the 3rd and last reason why most typical copywriting hacks don’t work is because they’re often not optimizing the right things.

Great. So the third and last reason why typical copywriting hacks don’t work is, again, as I mentioned, because they’re not actually optimizing for the right things. I don’t know. You’re probably thinking, what does that even mean? So let me give you a chance.

Let me explain it really quickly. So conversion copywriting isn’t actually about optimizing words. Conversion copywriting is about using words to capture and hold your user’s attention and build up curiosity, to give them reasons to care about the product or service that you’re presenting to them, and to get them to take a specific action. So we’re looking to optimize for attention.

Why should someone stop what they were doing to focus their attention on this ad, this levy page, this CX pop-up? giving them reasons to care. Why is this product so interesting? What value does it have hidden for them, and inspiring and encouraging them to take action right now, showing them that the value of what they’ll get as a result of converting is greater than the value of what of the value of the effort that it’s gonna take them to convert? So attention.

So, the reason why we’re optimizing for attention with words We want that we need to give the readers or the users a reason to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to the asset. based on the headline, the hero section, the accretive, or the subject line. So, imagine if you, yourself, you’re going through your LinkedIn feed or error scrolling, you know, you’re scrolling on Facebook, you’re scrolling on LinkedIn, where you’re going through emails in your inbox, you come across the caller email, you come across an ad. You know, when you click on something, are you really clicking with the intent to convert? No. Why do we click in the first place?

We’re often clicking because something caught our eye. So if something stood out to us, for some reason, otherwise it just ends up in spam, you know, if the call email goes to spam or we just get past the Adam We don’t even know what was waiting on the other side that we missed. So when we’re looking to optimize for attention, We look at not just doing these hacks like use of or you or use pass in ADA or writing a short headline, 5 to 6 words, you can grab their attention, We look at evaluating how we’re actually structuring the copy to pull the user into reading or engaging with the asset as a result. The same for reasons to care. People need to have a reason.

We need to give them a good explanation as to why they should, why, you know, why they should even listen to us and what is the benefit of them with listening. What is the benefit of them? Sorry for listening to us, we need to show them that they’re going to discover something that’s of value to them. So it’s excuse me.

So it’s going to be something that’s going to be helpful is going to entertain them. It doesn’t matter what that value is, but we need to unpack that value for them so that they see, wow, this is something that’s really, really amazing. this is an offer that I that I can’t refuse. So not just, again, act like social proof or just help connect features and benefits together. It’s about unpacking all the details of the offer explaining how it works in-depth and helping the reader or the user understand that the value of the offer, again, is greater than the cost for the anxiety that they might have about converting.

The last fine action, again, obviously, conversion copywriting is optimizing copy using words, optimizing the user experience, and using words to encourage them to take action. We wanna motivate them to convert by making them feel that converting is a smart decision. No one wants to suffer from buyer’s remorse. No one wants to click on a CTA button and go. I wish I didn’t do that and all want to submit their details on a, you know, on an opt-in form and you go, I really didn’t do that. Same idea.

So it’s not just when we’re looking at the realm of copper and it’s not just evaluating, the headline or micro-copy that’s next to the CTA that might push them to convert or total amount and variety of social proof on the page or trust symbols and guarantees. But evaluating if the user has a clear understanding of what to expect is going to happen to them after they convert and that they feel confident enough in converting so that they’re actually converting with some sort of intent which is huge because we own a lot of a lot of conversions pattern with 0 in 10, and that’s why we get bounces on the other side. So I know that was a lot to to take in, but you’re doing a good great job.

And now we’re actually gonna get into the extra juicy stuff. So now that we’ve covered really why most copywriting hacks fail, we’ll take a look at 4 approaches that take into account excuse me, what we just covered. So not things like right short headlines, but how to optimize for attention, for the reasons to care them to drive action. The reason why I’m suggesting, these unusual approaches is that I’ve seen them perform time and time to gain a test. I’ve included an example of a test for each of the 4 approaches just to give you some inspiration.

And again, I’d love for you to try out these, different approaches as well to your own copywriting firmaments instead of just following these kinds of high-level hacks. Okay. these tactics are applicable to copy that you can write for pretty much anything but any asset. So learning pages, web pages, ads, emails, UX pop-ups, the whole lot. Okay.

And these 4 unusual approaches are number 1, earning your audience’s objections. Number 2, referencing competing solutions, not brand names, competing solutions that exist in the marketplace. Number 3 is using a sticky metaphor. Even if it’s not necessarily a 100% data back. And number 4 is actually sometimes doubling or tripling the amount of copy on the page.

So let’s dive right in. The first approach that we like to try is to own our audiences’ objections. That is it’s low really slow there. I’m sorry, guys. Let’s skip across that. It was funny. I promised. No. Everyone knows that companies want to portray their businesses and products in the best light possible attracted to naturally high numbers because it makes us feel like we’re in good hands like this is someone that we can trust. It makes us feel confident that a company can deliver what promises. It makes us not feel stupid, but we’re not the first person to try it. A thousand people already tried it. 40,000 people already used this product.

24,000 people left 5-star reviews, but we see this all the time. And you can let me know as well in the chat if when you see when you see a whole ton of good reviews, do you actually go to Google to look for bad reviews as well. Is it just me? Or, you know, do you actually Google and Google honest reviews? And how many of you actually go to and when you’re looking at products and Amazon, don’t just read the files to actually go read the 1 and 2-star reviews to make sure you’re getting a world around the perspective.

I mean, exactly. We use these, reviews and high numbers, it’s used so much that we often start just tuning it out. So the idea of owning your audience’s objections is flipping this on their head, owning potential objections that customers might have about a product or service, or owning bad reviews or bad feedback that we get, and then it can make for much more powerful and much more attention-grabbing copy. So let’s take a look at some examples. I’m sure you’re gonna be familiar with this one.

If not, this is gonna be one of your new favorites. Here’s a classic ad by The Economist. I never read The Economist says management training age forty-two. So, of course, the ad here is implying that this person is in low alarm position, not only that they’re not the right target audience for the economists, but it’s implying that if they read the economist, that they probably wouldn’t be a management training at age forty-two. It works because it’s the opposite of what you think to see, and it’s exactly why it captures your attention.

It gives you and it also gives you a reason to care at the same time. There’s another ad here that was recently brought, Twitter probably saw it as well referenced on LinkedIn courtesy of Snowboard. It’s a one-star rating that actually reads. I’ve heard snowboarding is a tough mountain, but this was ridiculous. I felt like every chair was steep you’ve littered with tree wells, how soon you’re supposed to write in that?

Not fun. It’s very, very clear that this was written by someone who sounded too hard but is actually inspiring or challenging or motivating for someone who’s actually looking for that type of adventure. I’m yet. Here is another ad by Travel Corps also using a 1-star review. It says simply no. No Kangaroos. Then the ad for a beach in Australia, but looking at this image, do you care? There are no kangaroos there. So this is precisely why owning your own objections can be such powerful. So there are 2 key reasons as to why this really works.

Number 1 is that people are naturally skeptical, as we mentioned. They’ve seen the good stuff before. They know it, showing them the bad or being transparent about the bad, eases our skepticism and naturally uses our skepticism. And number 2, again, it’s so expected that juxtaposition is so unexpected.

It’s able to capture attention and hold their interest. This type of conduct can make someone stop scrolling, they’ll stop to read your ad, your landing page, or your webpage. It will even pull them into reading more because it’s gonna pique their curiosity. And I wanna know why we chose to use a bad review or why we chose to own that objection. So this type of approach is good to use for things like headlines, ad landing pages, and hero sections. The one caveat have just for this approach is to make sure that it’s used in moderation.

If you talk negatively all the time about a company, people would understand to believe it, and then they won’t listen to you at all. Human psychology, we’re just funny like that. But, you can use it in moderation, use it for one campaign or a couple of campaigns. Don’t run ads on end. Owning all of the objections rather than being transparent about them is really gonna help, but gives you an edge over all the companies that are simply promoting the number of users they have, and the number of 5-star reviews. Now I wanna introduce you to a test where I actually deployed this idea in the copying worked beautifully.

First up was a landing page for Dotto. I don’t even remember to say it correctly, so someone please, it’s a French company, so I’m following up saying it right. So Dotto is a sleep device that actually teaches people how to control their breathing so that they can fall asleep naturally, which is great for people who are insomniacs and struggle with their sleep because it means they don’t need to take melatonin. They don’t need to take sleeping tablets, do meditation, you’re doing other crazy things.

The problem is this is quite a few years back now. They had a landing page that wasn’t performing well. They didn’t nearly have as many users where we work together as they do now, but my original client who was working with the supplier had a landing page that was converting back 4 and a half percent. My client had come in and redone their lander with new copy, nice new images, graphics, and a video, and it pushed the landing page conversion rate up to 10%.

But they felt that they could still go a bit further. So as part of my research process, I went to Reddit to learn more about the target audience in Salmex, and what I found actually surprised me. I found that any reference to efficacy, that the effectiveness of any type of sleeping aids was not usually believed by people who struggle with sleeping problems. Chronic insomniacs still were struggling with sleep issues despite having pretty much tried everything else. So, that said, a 90% success rate 95% success rate, a 100% success rate actually triggered them and made them tune out. 

They weren’t willing to list them or read about anything new because they’d been burned with these other magical tools before. I knew this was an issue because the other landing page headlines were avoiding talking about how effective it was, they were trying to avoid the fact that the dollar had actually a 76% frequency rate. They were trying to avoid that because it doesn’t sound as nice as a 90% or 100% success rate, So I had a feeling that the pages were actually a bit clickbaity because the landing pages didn’t actually talk about how effective they were in terms of real numbers.

Again, they were just avoiding saying how effective Donna was because I only had a 76% success rate. It’s not impressive. And to say that, our finance sounds even a lot call. But under the knowledge that there are only access skeptics, I wouldn’t have really believed something if it’s a 90%, 100% success rate. Anyway, I told the client that we needed that objection.

So that became actually the focal point and headline of the landing page variation created. And this is an actual snippet from the landing page. I mean, not the design landing page, the work in progress landing page, with a 76% success rate hot tech gadget is working wonders from Somniacs, ordered it right in the headline as in an attempt to capture their attention and pull them into reading the copy to actually make them stop what they were doing and focus their attention to help them see that there was something with value here in the copy. And the result was pretty good. So this variation of the landing page with the service experts, extras, and rate headline had much better engagement than the other variations and actually converted at over 21%.

So a significant difference compared to the client’s previous conversion rates of 4 and a half percent and 10%. The focus here was absolutely on changing the headline. Any questions up until this point, or anything, or can it keep going through

D:

There are a few questions.

EB:

Okay. I’ll do. Yeah.

D:

We can unmute you, and, you can definitely go ahead with your question. Okay. Manmeet, I’m just about to unmute you. Please go ahead with your question. It seems like Manmeet has dropped off, but yeah.

EB:

That’s okay. Never mind. Okay. We’ll leave some time as well at the end, for questions. We’ll make sure we’ll try to catch people there or, well, we’ll find another way. We can also collect the questions if we run out, if we run too much out of time, I’m happy to collect the questions, and we can always go over them together, or maybe we can make them to the end of the session. Okay. We’re getting there. So it’s really not loading.

Hang on. I had no idea that the gifts would load this slowly. I was trying to make it fun. Hang on. Okay.

So the second slide, go to the second slide. Sorry. The second, copywriting approach that we’re gonna talk about is competing solutions. Okay. It looks like it’s frozen.

Nope. There we go. it actually loads now. Okay. It doesn’t.

Never mind. So we’ll keep correct. So I’m not saying that when we’re talking about competing solutions, I’m not saying you have to take it to extremes like Pepsi and Coke, poking fun at each other all the time. Well, like, Wendy’s does post fun at basically every other fast food restaurant in existence, but when I say that we’re talking about referencing competing solutions or don’t be afraid of referencing competing solutions in your copy. It’s to not be afraid of doing that when your copy is trying to move people from one stageable means to the other. This helps show that the solution that we’re proposing was actually much more effective or why it’s especially more effective for specific types of people.

The reason why this often works is because it leans into the idea of transparency showing that you are aware that our solutions exist in the market. It helps you earn trust even if you have something like low user numbers or you only have a couple of testimonials or you’re gonna have a couple of client logos to share because by being transparent about saying, you know, that there are other existing solutions in the market. It shows that you’re not ignoring the fact that the marketplace is crowded, but you’re also not putting other brand names down by not naming them. And that says a lot to people about the confidence that you have in your own offer and your own product service that you’re promoting. The second reason that it works is that referencing competing solutions makes breaches as users feel like you understand them.

The idea in general of the entire internet is that, it’s giving people autonomy so people can click through where they want to, whenever they want to, they can scroll up and down the page, they can go back and forth, like, people really hate funnels when you take away the nap, and they don’t like it because they don’t know where they were, they’re going. The whole idea of the internet is to give people autonomy in how they move and how they interact with different elements and different assets, different websites, and different platforms on the web. So by referencing that, it shows that you recognize that they have that type of autonomy, that they could leave this page at any point in time actually go and say, go to Google search for other solution. But by referencing them and showing how these other solutions potentially didn’t work for people like them, they’re actually helping them. They’re actually helping them save time.

My money is wasted in not just searching, but in trying and potentially buying other things that still might not solve their problem. On the other hand, if it also helps weed them out, if they’re really not a good fit, if there’s someone that they don’t feel that the issue they’re struggling with is a burning problem, and they say that there’s something that it’s cheaper or it’s faster in their mind that I think is cheaper, faster is a much easier solution, they can go with, but that’s okay. They didn’t convert. They weren’t really a good fit for the product in the first place, so you can actually help weed out those not-good-fit leads just for example. Just like we did with the micro-copy and the quiz funnel actually read it out and not-good-fit leads, on purpose. Number 3, as well, it gives them reasons to care.

It gives the audience reasons to care about the product or service that you’re offering them. So by unpacking that value, we’re doing that competitive differentiation for them already, which helps set them up to be in the right frame of mind converting later on. You’re already encouraging them to make a choice about what type of product they might be interested in the most. And I’ll show you, it’ll be a little bit clearer, I want to explain, to show you in just a second, the example. But this type of approach is good for using on things like product descriptions or product pages, landing pages in the body copy, comparison pages, sometimes in really long format copy, and occasionally in the UX pop-up, depending on what the offer is.

So, for example, you can see right here, I’m just taking it back and expanding the screenshot that I took from, some of the copy from the dollar’s landing page. But you can see already this is something that we used here. So, for example, it says, just like you, you know, millions of Americans struggle to go to sleep, And if and if they’re lucky, you’ve tried everything. They don’t drink coffee after 3 PM. They, don’t do coffee up to 3 PM.

They put on Zen lists, you know, Zen Music meditation lists on Play 2 on YouTube. They’ve tried all these other things or even distinct solutions out there, but still nothing is working. So you’re already showing the user that you recognize that there are other things out there that exist in the world that these products don’t always work for everybody. And now I’m gonna actually show you, Better Swoop, a much more in-depth example where this actually brought this out in full. So I’m going to introduce you to Kai.

This is a cold traffic money page project that we worked on together. So Kai is a woman-founded, women or luxury work bag company in Belgium. There might be stunning luxury work bags for the modern woman with clean lines, high-quality materials, and wonderfully durable, but they come with a price tag, and the most popular bag as featured here, the mini pyramid actually starts at €650.

It’s not cheap. And so now Kai was trying to break into the US market, but they weren’t having much success. It’s kind of hard to sell a luxury handbag because doesn’t already come with a famous name like Louis Vuitton or Chanel, Gucci, and especially at a high price point like this. So Kai had been testing numerous landing pages, and they were running traffic from Google display ads. So they were running, trying to run traffic to see if they could start warming up the US market.

They wanted to try something different to help increase their conversion rates and to help drive brand awareness, but at the same time, conversions, but to help drive brand awareness. And after they interviewed several of the customers, it became clear that they really loved the bag’s functionality. They never had a work bag that was as stylish as it was practical. Most handbags were too small. Didn’t have enough compartments or had too many compartments that didn’t actually fit things.

I mean, there are working women who have tried everything. They tried expensive luxury brand bags, but they couldn’t hold the size and weight of their laptops. They’ve tried maybe suitcases and briefcases, but they made me feel like they were dragging a suitcase like they were on a plane. They’ve tried oversized bags and honey-shaped bags, and we’re using ziplock to separate their pens, makeup, and charger cables, everything’s going to the right mess.

This bag actually took care of all that for them. One woman even said she used to have 3 different bags in her that she dragged around with her all day long, and this bag may actually replace them all. So Nuku, we had an opportunity to emphasize that comparison between what other women are actually doing, what other solutions women have tried versus the functionality of this product. So for the 1st, in the 1st entire third of the landing page that we’ve created for Kai, we actually spent talking about other solutions. It goes completely against logic error.

Okay. We’ve been talking about other solutions and other things that people have tried. but we went real and more and discussed all of the things that users, you know, including the ones reading this landing page went out more likely who have tried, but we’re currently using themselves. I’ll click on see if you can click on the link to show you for a second. If it’s gonna load oh, here we go.

Okay. So we actually spent, as I mentioned, the entire first but it’s a really long page as you can see from the school where we spent the entire first bit of the page talking about. all of these different other solutions or things they might have tried in the past. So this in-depth description of competing solutions was this way the reason why we included it was again to show people reading the page that we really understood what they were going through. we really get what their life looks like.

We really get what that struggle looks like. At the same time, it’s helping build that trust. You can trust somewhere more easily when you feel that they understand it. We do trust people, and we feel that they understand us and that they speak the same language as us. This is something in-depth compared to computing solutions or other existing solutions that were missing from a lot of other landing pages that they tried in the past.

And so the result was pretty cool. for a landing page, that was getting traffic from banner ads. So display ads and banner ads, you know, it’s 25, it was converting at 25%. So there were 25% of people through the page who were going immediately to, admitted clicking on the link or clicking on the CTA down the bottom actually going through to product page, and we actually saw as well that they had a much shorter time to purchase, a lot of significant purchases were coming in within a shorter time of frame, for example, a week.

It still had multiple touch points that they were coming in, for example, but having this landing page as their first touch point to the actual type of purchase was a lot, it was a bit of a shorter cycle for them. So when we say, again, as I mentioned, we’re saying we’re looking, you’re calling out competing solutions that don’t have to be a solution by name. It’s not like you tried x product, y product, or Zed product, but You’re talking about other things that they might have tried showing them that you understand their world. It’s something well worth testing when you have audiences that you need to form up and speak and explain to them well how your product differentiates from others in the market. And again, the gift is not gonna load.

I have a really cute gift. Yeah. This is Shane. It’s taking so long.

Okay. I’m sorry I’m gonna skip it. Hopefully, I’ll be happy to share the slides with all of you so you can catch all the gifts that don’t seem to be loading very well. 

No problem. So the 3rd unusual approach that we’re talking about is to use a sticky metaphor. And what we mean by sticky metaphor is this, even if the users have clicked through to the asset, whether that is an email ad landing page. It doesn’t matter what it is. We don’t they might be in the right state of awareness to convert, but we don’t know what their level of intent is almost impossible to measure it’s likely to be Marcus’ love attribution marketing. That’s why there’s so much so many issues between what’s an MQL and what’s an SQL and all these different levels of intent to purchase or intend to buy or attempt to convert even. You know, again, think about when you click on an ad or a landing page, you click on a call view, not on your inbox, do you really click on it because you want to buy? You sort of add it, like, I actually want to buy this and you go straight away. Sometimes that 1% of chance, that 1% of cases where it’s actually true in music because you can retarget it or then you already know the product.

But often we click because we just want to learn more and then go away and think about it. Exactly. you know, our ability to convert people. As much as we try to control it, it’s really not under our control. They have their own agendas. There were time frames. There were obstacles. towards converting. So instead of letting assets go to waste, just, you know, throwing hands-off there. So, oh, what are we doing?

You know, what are we doing with CRMs anyway? instead of just letting us go to waste and just seeing poor conversions, we can actually use what I like to call sticky metaphors because that lets us get inside their head. If we can get inside someone’s head, it doesn’t matter so much that they didn’t convert the first time, they won’t be able to start thinking about your product or your service while delivering a positive interaction, both with your brand or company. That’s what these sticky metaphors do. The sticky metaphors help keep you top of your mind, which will help serve you, and I can’t say the client or the boss that you’re working for, It keeps serving them later on, even if conversions initially are low.

That’s why sometimes you’ll launch a new campaign, and you might see, you know, a new campaign or a new variation that It doesn’t look like things are necessarily performing well, but then you take a step back and look at the bigger picture. You might go to your website and look at the total website analytics, and you see the organic traffic is up. purchases, revenue is up. You know, the the idea behind using a sticky metaphor by using 1, you’re not just using words. You’re you’re not just describing something in words that’s painting a vivid picture in their minds. Funding that’s going to stick, something that’s going to stay with them for a very long time, even if they’ve clicked away, even if they didn’t convert the first time. It’s going to encourage them to come back, encourage them to bookmark the page, encourage them to learn more about the company, and really get started in that journey to conversion. Now the reason why this works is because number 1, you’re giving them a message, a sentence, saying something that they can hold on to. It’s usually deeply emotive.

It’s really emotionally charged. It’s something that encompasses that entrance information for them much better than before after the phone does, and this helps keep you top of mind for them. And number 2 is because it becomes a reason to help make them care about you, to make them care about what you’re trying to teach them, or what you’re trying to share the information that you’re sharing with them about your product or service that you’re promoting. Again, it gives them a reason why they should remember you. And because this statement is usually so emotionally charged, usually makes a really strong positive impact, a positive first impression, and people carry that with them in their minds, or they can carry it over the course of the week.

So they’re with high care of them for the course of the week, and they’re already purchased, even if it’s, you know, a €650 handbag that they didn’t consider purchasing, or it can be it doesn’t matter what the price point is, but it’s something that it sticks with them and it keeps percolating in their mind, and it encourages them to bond with the brand or the company’s result. Now this is good for using on things like sorry. add copy, UX copy web pages. especially in intersections, product descriptions, product pages, and landing pages as well, as emails, well, basically everything. When we have a strong message, we’re able to apply it to everything.

And I can see this support point. Great. So I’m gonna show you an example, I have to redact this name, for a client because of privacy. but, just let me give you a bit of information, about this example. So this was there for an entire product funnel we were used to sticky metaphor, as the focal point for the entire funnel. A while ago I was working with a company that had an organic care kit treatment that helped restore women’s hair. Women over the age of forty experienced natural hair loss related to hormonal changes, so this company created an organic product that actually helped with that. the problem was the haircare market. It was supersaturated.

There was how they even gonna how are they even going to capture someone’s attention. How are they even gonna make it even worse even if they had an organic product, mine was just so ridiculously saturated, with hundreds of thousands of competing products. So I went and dug into some research. The problem was all the competing products with saying the exact same thing get longer, thicker, softer, more luxurious hair stronger hair, and get the hair you deserve. And it’s even these are the factual, hair treatments, but it’s even the same or new shampoos and conditions promote.

So just in terms of market saturation, how someone even begins to stand out even if they have a product, that’s really good. I knew there was no way that we were gonna be able to break through the nose at all and actually capture people’s attention to actually get anyone to convert. If we went within messaging that was similar, there was absolutely no way. So I went to one of my favorite places to collect the voice of customer research. Reddit. And from there, it was a whole different story.

So the reason one of the reasons why I like Reddit a lot to help collect voices of customer research is that there are a lot of social dynamics that happen first of all, not just in one customer interview, but in focus groups and surveys. a lot of the time people will tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what you really want to hear. And until, unless you’ve broken the eyes or unless you’ve built up some sort of relationship, with the person that you’re interviewing the serving, it can be really difficult to squeeze accurate information out of them. So why I like Reddit is because you’re actually able to go in and view conversation and you’re really able to be a fly on the wall. We’re able to look at conversations, see how people talk with each other, see what words they use, see how they describe the problems that they have and literally know even though you’re there observing what’s happening.

So instead of you being aware that someone else from the outside is looking in, then no one knows that someone else is reading. They’re the other layers that Reddit has and on, everyone is anonymous. So no one is going to know who you are, what you said, or be able to track get back to you.

So that also lets people feel more open or more willing to share their honest opinions and honest stories with all this feedback. So I found there were quite a few, quite a few analytic groups that I found and these women were just being super open with their experiences. And as I was going through all these different three different conversations, one statement just came up again and again and again. And this woman kept saying I wish I could get the hair of my teens, my 20s back. They did say I want softer, more luxurious, stronger, more radiant hair, but when they were talking amongst themselves, they said, it’s like, I remember the hair of my twenties, what that was like.

And I wish, like, why can’t I have that back again? So for them, that was a sticky metaphor saying the hair of their twenties was a much shorter, much more vibrant, much more emotional way of saying all this list of bullet points at the same time. It was a it creates a vivid it was a vivid picture, something that they were able to hold onto each person, Evewoman was able to remember what that actually meant for her, what they felt like, what it smelled like, how strong it was. You didn’t need to actually list out all the descriptors of the hair, we were able to confine it all into one message that made sense to me. That settlement is what became the lead message that we infused in every ad, every landing page headline, the Hero website homepage copy, and basically every asset in the entire funnel.

The result was a product funnel that generated sales a day. It was an $871 product, but that was pretty much from the launch day. So despite the high saturation in the market, it was terrible to generate such a large amount of cells per day. And when I actually got the chance to interview some customers after the first round, purchases came through. It was amazing to hear from them that so many of them asked, you know, what inspired you. And I said I wanted to hear my twenties back.

And they were so excited to share their stories because, their stories moved me because not just that it was the promise of the product, but that the product actually fulfilled for them as well. So that was their experience they reported that they really felt like they were getting the heroin twenties back. Okay. And I’m alright, Elliot, a little bit over time, but that’s okay. Oh, we’re up to the last, we’re up to the last, unusual approach, so the lucky last and, but not the least, the least didn’t you, and we’re actually is the least intuitive of all the copywriting approaches, and that is when a doubt you might consider doubling what tripling the amount of copy that you have in page or an ad.

I don’t know if someone’s gonna say, but wait. Wait. Wait. No one no one reads online. People don’t read online.

You forget all the information they need from videos. copy needs to be sure because no one’s gonna read it. But the problem with statements like this is that there is no problem because people read far more online than they actually realize. The reason was that we don’t notice copy when it’s good because the outcome of good copies of good user experience. We do notice copy when it’s bad, when it’s long and windy, when it’s not clear, or when it’s missing because the outcome of that bad copy or missing copy is a bad user experience.

And it’s only when we take copy away completely, do we actually realize how much we actually read online without realizing it. For example, here’s a beta without a copy. No idea what’s happening here. I’m thinking, you know, it’s for some sort of company, but we absolutely have no idea what the offer is or what’s going on here. And here’s the UX pop-up without copying.

Same thing. We have no idea actually what’s actually what’s what’s happening here. They say a picture is a 1000 words, but a 1000 words. Right. What’s going on?

And there’s even a homepage hero section without a copy. So I think you get the point. So, while doubling or trippingly, the amount of copying might seem really daunting or might seem like it’s going against total logic. Here are a few reasons why it works. So, it means that most copy is too short.

And I’m gonna say this again, as we mentioned, people don’t notice copy when it’s good. People notice copy when it’s bad, but most copy is actually too short. People try to emulate Nike or Apple and try to come away with these. Like, we can say 3 words, you know, with a period in between each of them. And if people are gonna understand and say, wow, this is amazing.

We can have nothing in just a picture of a snake or people gonna flip and buy it. you know, but often, often the copy is just not long enough. It doesn’t contain enough information or context for the reader or for the user, sorry, to make them feel like they’re equipped with the information they need to convert to feel confident about converting. The second reason, again, So just expanding on the first point. As we mentioned, people want to know why they should care about a product and why they should convert. And you can’t do that in 5 to 6 works, you need more copy to actually be able to explain that, to share that argument to share all those reasons and benefits as to what they’ll get as results of converting. And the second thing is more copying usually means more value. There are psychological principles. It’s like when we see more of something, especially when it comes to copy, usually means it automatically translated to us, imagine that there’s more value to the product or service. So if you’re trying to sell something of value that has a high price point, you’ll generally need a lot more copy to convince someone to convert, not just on a singular asset, but a multiple asset.

It’s not because they actually need more copy, but it’s because the sheer amount sometimes physical amount of copying the page makes them feel that this is something that they can trust. And this is the reason why all those long-form direct response letters, long-form sales pages, long-form print ads, magazines, and all those, all those really long-form types of copy that they still actually convert really well, even though it’s against even though it’s against the logic that people can’t read online. So downloading or tripling the coffee, should be done lightly, but it can often work for home pages for product descriptions, product pages, landing pages, and body copy, often ad copy, you can always try testing a longer ad over some of my clients’ testing ads. You know, Facebook and LinkedIn as it doesn’t matter. Do you run a short variation?

But please, try one. Push that character limit of 500 characters on LinkedIn. You know, push it and see what you can and often the results that they’re getting for the longer ads are actually much better because they simply have that much more context. They have much more understanding about what’s waiting for them on the other side of the click. minor exception, long copy is not necessarily good for your ex pop-ups, push notifications, and emails because these are types of assets that are usually best to be short, and sweet, to the point that you can always test it.

So our last case study would actually illustrate this, and this one is very different from the others because it’s a book description and not just any book description. It’s for a B2B book on Amazon. And this one was super tricky because we wanted to launch a really strong variation advocate. Here’s what happened. Wes Bush is the founder of the Productlight Institute which teaches product work to software founders and marketers. He’d written an incredible book back in 2019. It was just starting to take off. But Wes felt that with the traction that his community was getting, as well as the growing more interesting product-led growth as a GTM strategy, he felt that he could cost Duke a lot more. So he posted the, you know, post the book on Amazon, he put up a description that hadn’t really updated it since. Let’s convert it.

Okay. There are a few cells here and there, a few cells there, but nothing really exciting. and I felt we really had some strong opportunities here to highlight the value of the product. can see the original copy was quite was quite short. Now, one of the things, again, as I mentioned earlier on, if we want people to convert, they need to feel that the value of what they’re going to get as a result of converting the product to service is much greater than what they have to give away the money, time, their email address, what they have to give away in order to per.

So we knew that we were gonna have to add a lot more copy to the book’s description to make people feel excited about it. We knew we had to really unpack the value of what was contained inside the book. So we decided I should go through the book chapter by chapter and pull out one key inside of talking point from every single section to really show people that there was something for them to learn on every single page of the book, so to show them it was not just interesting to read, but it was so incredibly valuable for them. And this is the end result. Maybe the amount of coffee here in the Amazon book description, it’s tough. Now, just to compare, here is actually the two variations side by side. You can clearly see the difference, in the amount of copy between the two variations, but The results were actually pretty cool, and I actually emailed Wes, last week to ask him what the improvement was. he said his sales had doubled since we updated the copy. And that’s pretty good because this page now pays well. This variation went live in 2020, so it’s been doubling sales for 3 years now.

Even though in the meantime, he’s raised the price from 6 to 18. So this variation is still performing, you know, almost 3 years after it was launched because this new variation now clearly demonstrates that there is a ton of value there in the book and that it was more than worth the asking price. It’s more than worth the purchase price. People are giving up their money in order to get this book because it’s just so valuable. And I wasn’t joking, and I told you that this copywriting process would be refreshing. That’s all for today.

I really hope that you’ve enjoyed this session, and then it’s giving you some interesting persons to think about when running your next copy experiments. thank you for having me.

D:

Thank you so much, Eden. It was definitely a very insightful session. Personally, I am going to take a lot of lessons from the seminar and practice it at my job. And, yeah, a few examples really struck through. and I’m hoping that’s the case for all of us. There are a few questions, that we can, you know, kind of take. So one question is from Manvi. Can you be creative in the legal industry if the potential leads you’re going after are highly professional individuals?

EB:

That’s a really good question. I’m not sure. Again, in the legal industry, there are a lot of regulations and often that we have to stick to so we can’t necessarily be particularly creative with some aspects there when we have a lot of regulations. If it’s banking, finance, you know, anything that’s related to law and legal proceedings as well, We have to be very careful about what we do. One of the things that I like to do when faced with something like this is to the creativity is there in using the voice of customer as much as possible.

So trying to pull in the the customer, reach them, and speak to them at their eye-to-eye level. So, for example, pulling in as I meant, just for example, I went to Reddit and I was able to find some interesting voices of customers that they that was able for the able for the target audience to feel like we were speaking to them as an insider or someone who dispersment going through this or so that we were able to make a connection through the words, through the words that we actually used that are specific messages that we chose as a result So I would encourage you if they want to go to Reddit to look to see what information you can pull, what’s actually relevant for them to get an understanding of how they speak to each other. what type of words they use, if they what particular jargon they use, if if they use jargon, if they’re using it regularly, when they’re talking amongst themselves, if you use that on the page, gonna feel comfortable with it as well. So see what you can do in terms of tapping into their their own language as much as possible to reflect that. So it’s gonna meet them on the same level. So I’m not saying right for a 4 to 6-grade reading level. That’s another copywriting, a typical copywriting hack that people say, changes the grade reading level of the copy. It’s not so simple.

If you’re aiming for professionals, you don’t wanna down it down too much. It’s gonna start their intelligence if you’re feeling this present or the no one I’m talking about. So try and mirror the customer’s own language as much as possible to target the audience’s own natural language as much as possible, and that’s really gonna help. That’s where the creative aspect of conversion copyright really comes in.

D:

Definitely. We’re all fans of creativity. and the GIFs kind of proved, that in the presentation. But, yeah, thank you so much. You did.

And I see that is the last question Oh, that’s one more question for me. Will that be a replacement for this? Yep. Definitely, Katie will reach out to you. And, this has been a very valuable session from meeting and and show a lot of our, audiences, the community community at large will benefit from it.

EB:

Thank you so much again. And yeah. Thank you for having me. It was really, really on it. I hope that everyone’s able to at least learn one thing from today’s presentation.

D:

I’m sure. yeah, see you guys soon for yet another, VWO webinar. Yeah. Bye.