CRO Minidegree Review — Week 4

This is the fourth post in the series of twelve posts where I am reviewing CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Mini-degree, once every week. In this post, I will be continuing the step-by-step process to conduct research for finding great conversion copies.

Alright, so we discussed the principles on the basis of which Momoko Price (one of my favorite instructors) created the framework for conversion copywriting in the last post.

Let’s get into the depth of these elements right away:

1. COPY TEARDOWN:

The first step is to understand what is missing in our current copy on the target page. This helps in understanding what improvements are needed and what needs to be prioritized.

This is done using a simple google spreadsheet where the page is divided into various sections:

• Orienting the user when they land on your page
• Appealing to their motivation
• Conveying a unique value
• Establishing credibility by eliminating anxiety
• Present the offer and CTA well
• Optimized sales form to reduce friction

All these goals can happen on the same or different pages but all are important. Each section has some related yes/no questions on the basis of which we get a sense of what needs improvement like “Does the header copy explain what this product or service is?” or “Is the copy aligned with the copies on the major source of traffic — SERP results or paid ads?” etc. This exercise helps to find out the gaps which we address systematically to reach where we want to.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how you can create one for yourself:

Copy Teardown Framework — Momoko Price

2. MESSAGE MINING — EXTERNAL SOURCES:

This section is about stealing a memorable first draft of your copy directly from the mouths of your prospects.

We basically scout the internet (Google reviews, Quora answers, App reviews, Testimonials, Mouthshut ratings, Reviews on our website, etc.) and copy the exact sentences from real users to find out 3 critical things (MVA):

• Motivation: What are the outcomes that they’re hoping to get from our page, their pain points in the absence of your product, and those trigger events that cause them to start going looking for your product.
• Value Proposition: What are your unique benefits, delightful features and make or break reasons for using your product.
• Anxiety messages: What are the things that people worry about when they are thinking about buying your product or service, psychological friction points, perceived risks, etc.

Here’s my application for 1mg.com:

Message Mining in practice

What do use these message swipes for? Relevant value-focused headlines, authentic lead paragraphs and hooks, market-specific terminology, and slang that makes the reader feel like that we “get them”. An easy way to organize all this information is via Google doc — labeling each copied statement as Motivation, Value Proposition, Anxiety.

You’ll be surprised to see how a real user actually sees your (or your competitors’) products and services — Marketers usually miss this.

3. MESSAGE MINING — OWN USERS:

A treasure trove of data on MVA also needs to be mined from our visitors and customers. We typically use 3 methods here — Surveys, 1-on-1 interviews & remote user tests.

Our visitors and customers (who actually purchased) have different product awareness. So the questions also need to be different for them. Visitors are the perfect people to get a sense of, “What’s in their head” when you started looking around for your product?” While your paying customer is the one who understands which of those messages matter the most.

• Customer surveys are great for revealing unique benefits, ah-ha moments, desirable outcomes, and once they actually use the product, what it did for them and how it improved their life.
• Phone interviews help in getting the full clear personal experience of using your product. They are great for before and after scenario understanding, emotionally compelling points, and for getting rich testimonials.
• User tests help to get comments on how effective your existing copy is, revealing product story if you don’t have any customers, understanding if there are any huge clarity points or friction points on your existing sales page that need to be fixed.

4. CRAFTING A UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION (UVP):

So what exactly is UVP? If we keep the jargon off, it basically means letting the user answer “What’s in it for me, and why should I choose you over other options?” when they read your unique Value Proposition. But don’t just stop there. Go ahead and prove it.

You want to find an overlap between what can your product do that gives your customers what they want and what’s uniquely desirable about your product.

Finding your Unique Value Proposition

But, what to do when the product is new and doesn’t have a lot of customers? Here’s what you can do:

a) List your product’s top features

b) Pinpoint the unique features

c) Align those features to customer pains

d) Define desirable outcomes for each pain point

e) Rank your customer’s top pains by frequency and severity and see what floats to the top

f) Flip the top pain points as an enhancement to write a value proposition

g) Score the UVPs and select the best one

Here’s a snapshot of how to rank these:

Scoring UVPs

5. MESSAGE HIERARCHIES:

Stories are powerful. This section is about how to use a storytelling framework and overlap that with our research in message mining steps to craft our conversion copies. Here’s how a typical storytelling framework looks like:

Typical Story Framework

In marketing parlance, we need to set the context — who is the audience, what are you selling, and why, the value proposition is right. From there, you get your features and benefits.

Then, you get to start diving into how the solution relates to that setting. We build excitement & anticipation around achieving a goal. We get into that rising intensity of laying out features and benefits, how it works, proofs, that kind of thing.

The climax is when you pitch the sale. You put out your call to action. You want to give them a payoff here like you’ve built the anticipation towards the acquisition of some awesome thing.

Then you have incentives that you want to include, at that moment to help get them over the hurdle. You have the actual falling action which is them just filling out the form and going through the process of following through on their commitment to act — make a purchase.

And then finally the resolution is your post-conversion user experience.

Here’s how the story arc looks like when we overlap our findings from mining exercise:

Story Arc with the findings of the Message Mining exercise

An important point here is to understand the awareness level of your user because the story changes depending upon that. I will leave this for some other post.

6. WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT:

If you have done all the work in the first 5 steps, this one is the easiest and takes the least time.

Simply start with the following message flow and add testimonials (or some other types of proof) wherever possible to back your claims.

Message Flow

Here, your mining exercise will be the key. Simply copy and paste the statements we gathered in the mining process with slight modifications (change ‘I’ to ‘You’, for example). This serves as a great first draft.

7. EDITING YOUR COPY:

Momoko lists her 7 rules to improve the first draft significantly:

a) Be Clear — What type of product are you selling? It must be absolutely clear.

b) Match the reader’s mindset — Message match with a quick question (that got them to a ‘yes’ and got them to the page) and then answer with a specific unique value proposition.

c) Blow them away with Value — Make an exhaustive list of specific happy outcomes and elimination of specific pain points and then prove it with hard data and rich testimonials wherever you can.

d) Use quantifiable proof, if possible — Specific proofs help believability.

e) Paint a picture with your words — Ask yourself if you can “see” the description clearly in your head. Replace general nouns, generic adjectives, and weak verbs with specific, vivid & punchy words.

f) Show & tell generously — use imagery and also call out what people
should notice with annotations & added copy

g) Cut anything that’s not doing any real work — edit, edit, edit!

8. CONVERSION-FOCUSED FORMATTING & LAYOUT:

Certain design factors can dramatically influence your copy’s effectiveness. These are:

1. Position of each element of copy on the page: We read in a specific pattern.

2. Size of each element of copy: Bigger object is more noticeable.

3. Order: Visual hierarchy of the page needs to align with the order of your copy. Else, it won’t make sense to the reader.

4. Amount of space or clutter around your copy: Clutter kills conversions. Keep the number of page goals minimal, and eliminate content and elements that don’t support them.

5. Typography: Bigger, higher-contrast fonts are easier to read. Extreme line heights (<0.8, >1.8) hurts readability.

6. Directional cues: Eye-tracking studies consistently show our eyes’ tendency to be drawn to (or guided by) human faces, pointing gestures (arrows, fingers, gazes, etc.), and outlines.

7. Color contrast of copy vs other background, images, etc: Contrast tells our eyes what to focus on. If contrast is low or poorly controlled, our ability to distinguish between elements (or characters) is dramatically reduced, which impacts our ability to read the text.

Finally, it helps to lay out your copy in wireframes & prototypes. Readability changes as the texts are converted to actual size dimensions. It becomes easier to judge the effectiveness of a copy in prototype form.

Momoko suggests one of the popular wireframing/prototyping tools like Balsamiq, Sketch or Figma.

This sums up my detailed review and learnings from a wonderful course from CXL. Hope you picked up some useful nuggests.

Happy Learning!

Yatin