This is the wrap up of my second week with CXL’s Conversion Optimization minidegree. This week, I went through Momoko Price’s product messaging course, a very hands-on course on creating copy using voice-of-customer as building blocks.
As I’m a conversion copywriter, a lot of the concepts taught in this course are familiar to me. Momoko’s course is extremely detailed and gives me processes and frameworks you can use right away.
Be warned that this lesson is very exercise-based.
Momoko used her project with petdoors.com to show how her process works.
If you already have a sales page you need to create, perfect! You can follow along with the lesson and practice using Momoko’s frameworks, checklists, and templates.
Conducting A Copy Teardown
As Momoko mentioned, copy teardowns are often contradictory. The advice you get from a copy teardown varies depending on the copywriter’s personal preferences, not an objective point of view.
To be fair, most of them are great advice. However, teardowns often depend on the copy being reviewed and the copywriter doing them, so the feedback you’ll hear sometimes contradicts each other.
Having a checklist like the one Momoko created implements a system for teardowns, which speeds up the process and allows you to pinpoint the issue with your copy as quickly as you can.
The copy teardown checklist distributed in this lesson is based on three elements: MEClab’s conversion heuristic formula, Cialdini’s principles of influence, and Claude Hopkins’ rules in scientific advertising.
Message Mining
This entire module is based on the concept that you’ll be able to avoid writing your copy from scratch.
Instead of going off the rails and turning your copywriting project into a creative writing exercise, you can find messages that work for your clients by asking your customers.
Didn’t see that coming, did ya?
We’ll use your customers’ and prospects’ words to maximize the effect of your copy.
I’m not talking about explicitly asking them what they thought you should put in your copy.
Figuring that part out is your job.
So, how do you do it?
Well, there are a couple of methods mentioned in the course:
- Review mining
- On-site polls
- (Paying) Customer surveys
- Interviews with paying customers
- User tests
Each method is used to figure out different things you can use in your copy.
There is a lot of actionable points in this lesson, but let’s go deeper into how you should survey paying customers.
There are three aspects to a customer survey:
- Targeting
- Invitations
- Your survey questions
Let’s start with targeting. Often the answers you get from surveys aren’t as effective, just because you’re surveying the wrong customer pool.
For example, you can survey current customers to see why they picked you instead of your competitor (unique features). Survey past customers if you want to figure out which promises you’re not fulfilling and annoy your customers.
Next up, your invitation.
If your invitation looks like a promo email, your customers’ eyes will glaze over and think, “Oh, it’s another sales email. Aight, better things to do.” And off they go, to another email in their 100+ pile of unread emails.
You can use your copywriting prowess to get more responses by creating a genuine invitation (without your usual design) and explain what’s in it for them if they take the survey.
Finally, the questions. The questions fundamentally depend on your project and what you want to find out. Momoko mentioned five questions she often asks when she surveys customers.
Notice that each question has a certain conversion component as a goal.
Categorizing your messages by topic and component, whether it’s from review mining, surveys, or polls, will help you later on when you need to choose your best messages from hundreds of answers.
Creating Value Propositions
The strategy in this lesson works when you don’t have access to customers, especially for new or niche companies.
Instead of voice of customer data, we’ll use a brainstorming session to figure out what’s so special about your product.
We gather the materials for your unique value proposition by listing out the product features, the pain or problem it solves, and the desired outcome of using the product.
To find the most effective value proposition, you can rank the problem’s severity and frequency. Pick a couple of the highest-ranking problems, features, and desired outcomes. These are the ideas you can use to create your value proposition.
Messaging Hierarchies
After you’ve done your research, you’ll end up with a bunch of messages with certain qualities: motivation, value, and anxiety.
These messages are the ones you need to categorize and sort to end up with a message hierarchy.
Momoko has a framework for your standard sales page so you can arrange your messages. Generally, here’s how you want to structure your copy:
- Value proposition (+CTA)
- Match motivation
- Demonstrate value
- Shoot down anxiety
- The offer (+ CTA)
But let’s talk about something more interesting.
Although this is a solid order and you should definitely use it to structure your copy, there is one more thing you need to consider here.
Your customer’s awareness level.
During Momoko’s test with petdoors.com, she discovered that the visitors coming into petdoors.com are mostly comparison shoppers who are already so far beyond problem aware that the motivation copy just serves as a distraction.
The order provided is great for your first run, but look for ways to optimize it with head tracking and find out if there’s something you need to add or remove.
The First Draft
Congrats, you’re done with the most difficult part of your job!
After some extensive research and planning, here comes the most fun stage of your job.
You have a messaging hierarchy, you have a ton of messages.
Now all you have to do is to combine these messages into something that makes sense to your prospects and convincing them to take action.
There are so many messages in your bag now. You can’t use them all!
So the first step to building your first draft is to pick the messages you’re going to use.
But remember: you want to pick messages your prospects will relate to.
All you need to do is create a pivot table in your messages spreadsheet, to figure out which topic shows up most often.
Once you pinpoint the topic, you should focus on (this would be the one often mentioned), you can grab the messaging hierarchy you created earlier and begin filling in the blanks.
For the best result, lift snippets verbatim from your customer’s messages.
Don’t worry if the sentence is a little weird, or choppy, or just plain imperfect.
It’s the first draft, after all! You can have rounds after rounds of edits if you want later on.
Editing Your Copy
If you’re a copywriter, I’m sure you have your own editing routine.
But here’s the basic editing tips Momoko gave in her editing class
- Be clear and explicit, don’t make your visitors guess what you’re trying to say.
- Match the reader’s mindset when landing on your page.
- Blow their minds away with value.
- Use quantifiable proof whenever possible to make your copy more believable
- Paint a picture with your words by using specific nouns, vivid adjectives, punchy verbs, calling out your readers, and using word pictures.
- Show and tell generously
- Remove anything that’s not working to move your customers down your page.
Formatting Your Copy
We’re trespassing into designer territory now.
Wireframing your copy can help your designers implement your copy effectively. This eliminates the back and forth needed when your copy isn’t performing as well because your bullet points suddenly turned into one monstrous, unreadable paragraph.
If you’re like me and don’t have any design knowledge or experience whatsoever, you (and your designer) will appreciate this section tremendously.
Here are seven points you should note when wireframing your copy.
- Position
Readers tend to read a page in an “F” pattern. You check the upper left quadrant first before moving downwards and reading on, as shown by these heatmaps.
- Size
Big = important. Small(er) = less important. Keep this in mind while you’re arranging your copy to make sure you’re not putting an emphasis on the wrong element.
- Order
A copy is a narrative. When the order is messed up, the story also gets messed up. Pay attention to your visual hierarchy to make sure you’re not breaking the flow of your copy.
- Space/noise around copy
Keep your readers focused by eliminating other distractions in your page that aren’t doing anything for your copy.
- Typography
Two takeaways here: Bigger and high-contrast fonts are easier to read. Extreme line heights (less than 0.8 or over 1.8) hurt your readability.
- Directional message
Directional messages, such as arrows, line of sight, or fingers influence where your readers’ attention will move to. Check your page for these to see if you’re taking focus away from your copy.
- Contrast
Contrast is another aspect influencing readability. A low or poorly controlled contrast makes it harder to distinguish your elements. As a side note, use high-color contrast for the important elements in your copy, such as your CTA buttons.
The greatest thing about this course is how exercise-oriented it is.
Unlike other courses, where all you can do is take notes and practice on your own later, this one actually provides frameworks, templates, and checklists you can use for your own project.
Now that we’re done with Course 4 (out of 11), I’m thinking of finishing the first module, Foundations next week.
A quick glance at the timestamp for each course has proven that it’d be hard for me to do that by next week.
But I’ll try my best to at least almost finish the first module next week.
8 hours down, 72 hours to go!
