The Transcript

3 Simple Hacks for Better Copy and More Conversions in Less Time

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur, I am your host Jerod Morris, the VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. This is episode number 20 of The Digital Entrepreneur. Today I am joined by Joanna Wiebe, the conversion copywriter for Copy Hackers, where they promise to help you write more persuasive, believable, and usable copy sans pixie dust, so you can boost your website e-mail conversion rates. I’ve had the good pleasure of working with Joanna, so we can certainly vouch for their work. They do a great job.

Something else that I learned recently about Joanna — I actually learned this earlier today — is that she likes making up new words, like indeedly for instance, and using them casually in conversation. I too share in this wonderific pastime, which may be why she and I get along so well. Joanna, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, it is great to have you here with us.

Joanna Wiebe: It’s wonderific to be here.

Jerod Morris: Yes, indeedly.

Joanna Wiebe: Indeedly.

Jerod Morris: Joanna’s appearance today continues our series here on The Digital Entrepreneur, where we’ve been talking with some of our esteemed speakers who will be at Digital Commerce Summit, which is coming up this October. Joanna’s going to be a featured speaker, and her session is going to be titled, “How to Make Good Copy Great When Selling Digital.” In this session, she’s going to be discussing real-life examples from actual projects that Copy Hackers has been working on with companies like Buffer, Wistia, and our very own Rainmaker Platform.

On today’s episode, we’re going to explore a few of those projects, some of those ideas here today. But make sure that you come to Denver so that you can hear Joanna and all of our other terrific speakers live. Early bird tickets are still available, so you’re definitely not too late. Joanna’s going to be there. I will be speaking. And, of course, members of the Rainmaker Digital team like Brian Clark and Sonia Simone will be speaking as well, along with a host of our friends from around the digital entrepreneurship space, including Rand Fishkin, Jeff Walker, Tara Gentile, Joanna Penn, Chris Lema, and many, many more.

As we say right there on the website — in the kind of conversion copy that we hope would make Joanna proud — this is the conference and networking event where you will discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital products and services. So don’t miss it. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Again, early bird tickets are still available for now.

Joanna, let’s dive in here, and I would like to kick this off with an admission that I need to make to you.

Joanna Wiebe: Uh-oh.

Jerod Morris: No, it’s okay, and it has nothing to do with the admission that we just talked about before we went …

Joanna Wiebe: Let’s not talk about that.

Jerod Morris: No, you will not. You spoke at the first Authority conference, which was now more than two years from the day that we’re recording this.

Joanna Wiebe: Right.

Jerod Morris: In your presentation at Authority, you spoke about improving our call to action buttons, and you discussed the two elements that prevent people from clicking on buttons, that is friction and fear. To this day, that is one of the lessons from that conference that has stuck with me. Every time I have a call to action button I’m always thinking, “Okay, how do I reduce friction and/or fear to make this as easy to click on for as many people as possible?”

I’m sure the alliteration had something to do with it. You also talked a lot about the lizard brain and engaging the lizard brain. I think just because this little easy framework — friction and fear — it works. So thank you for that lesson. It’s another reason why going to conferences is such a great thing to do. In addition to the networking, you can pick up these little nuggets that really carry through. Maybe everybody will have different ones, but I’m very appreciative of that one.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, that’s cool. I’m glad you remember that. That’s awesome to hear. That was a really fun conference.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it was, and this one will be good too. To start, just give us a little background, if you would.

Joanna Wiebe: Sure.

Jerod Morris: Can you explain a little bit more about what you and the Copy Hackers team does?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, absolutely. We get to work with some pretty cool companies — present company included — where we optimize copy, essentially, or we aim to, at least. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. That’s the nature, and that’s why we test. We help organizations either write better copy, or copy that’s worth testing and measuring, or we teach them how to do it. Our blog teaches you how to do it. Our courses teach you how to do it. And if you really want to see how we work and to have us go in and help you hands-on, then we sometimes accept clients. Only the coolest clients, obviously. Just kidding. No, we’re really lucky to work with very cool people that we love, so that’s wicked.

That’s what we do, and the biggest thing that we focus on — outside of being really dedicated to copywriting and messaging — is testing. To be sure that we at least know if something’s working or not. Then we can hopefully have a good hypothesis so we know why it didn’t work or why it did work, so we’re not just constantly guessing and then guessing at something else and then something else. Yeah, that’s what we do.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s the thing that’s been so clear in working with you guys, is the culture of testing that you have and the commitment to testing. Do you find with individuals that you work with, with companies that you end up working with, that the people aren’t testing enough or that there isn’t enough of a commitment to it?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. I think it’s a scary thing for a lot of people. It depends where you’re at when you’ve heard of it, but testing feels like … If you’ve just heard of it, it sounds exciting. And then you go and you look into it, and you’re like, “Oh man, I need so much traffic to test a page. And then I need to have a big enough change in the conversion rate to close a test. Wow, I need so much, it’s just going to be too hard.” But you try doing one test, you don’t get any conclusive results, and you just throw your hands up and say, “Testing doesn’t work for me.”

Then there’s the other end where it’s like, “Okay, we don’t test, we only engage in marketing automation, behavioral automation, behavioral marketing, and personalization as a subset of that. So if we A/B test, it’s within this really complex system of marketing automation, essentially.” Those are the bigger businesses that look at A/B testing as trying to find a single solution for a whole bunch of people, which we all know isn’t possible in most cases — to find a single solution or way to message something that works for everybody visiting that page or reading that e-mail.

At the other end of the spectrum, people discount it as trying to do too much with too little, and at the first side of it, the newer people coming into testing, it just feels like you need too much traffic to make it work. Naturally people shy away from it, and I certainly don’t blame them for it. When you get into testing there’s a lot to consider. Where the sources of traffic are, should you be including mobile traffic in your test? If not, should you be doing a separate test just for mobile traffic? There’s so much to think about that I think it can be a bit off-putting for people.

When it comes down to it though, A/B testing is really just, “Here’s the page that we’re currently working with. Here’s what we think we might want to replace that page with because we feel — based on a lot of different data points — that this is the stronger message to go with, but we don’t know. So we’re going to A/B test it one page versus the other.” That’s really, at its core, all it really has to be about. But it’s easy to over-complicate that.

Simple A/B Test Anyone Can Use to Gain Valuable Insight Into Audience Behavior

Jerod Morris: For someone who’s listening to this, maybe they’ve thought about testing but they haven’t done it yet, or maybe they have but it’s been kind of complicated and it feels real convoluted for them. Do you have any suggestions for a simple test folks can go out the door with? Maybe dip their toes in the water? Maybe it’s changing just a headline on the homepage or changing a button. Is there a universal first step people can take to start wading into the testing waters if they haven’t yet?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, and it’s basically those two things you just talked about, actually. There’s two ways that I recommend if you haven’t done a test before. The first one is to do an A/B test on your highest traffic page, generally. Generally on your highest traffic page, where that new variation you come up with has a new headline and a new button. Not one or the other, but both changed on variation B. That’s because that button is the real site of conversion. It’s where the measuring happens, on the button.

If you only change the headline but the button isn’t improved, then it complicates things a little bit, or it means you’re going to have to really swing for the fences with that headline, or be dramatically different. I recommend if you’re just starting out do a headline plus button test where that becomes your new variation. Another really easy way to start testing is to test the placement of that button or call to action. If you currently have it in your homepage hero section — where basically every digital business on the planet has a button, in that hero space — try moving it.

Now, obviously, any CRO person will absolutely say, “Well, you have to have a reason why.” We can get into that at some other point, but if we’re just talking about, “Here, test it,” just to get into testing, just to dip your toes in the water, then just test removing that from the hero and moving it further down the page. See what happens. Or test it as a sticky button that follows you as you go. Buttons are the absolute easiest test to start with.

Jerod Morris: But don’t move it so much that there’s increased friction.

The Surprising Button Placement That Actually Worked Wonders for One Company

Joanna Wiebe: The question when we’re like, “Okay, where does a button go?” is at what point is our prospect — our one reader, the one we’re actually trying to convert — at what point are they ready to move forward? You put a button in front of people, they will click it. People like to click the button. That’s the lizard brain, right? “Ooh, I see it, I just – Ta-da! I click it! I didn’t even really look at the things that I need to look at yet.”

We actually did a test on Sweatblock.com, which is an e-commerce site. It’s a little bit different. But we tested a variation of the homepage, kind of a one-pager. Our variation B moved the button way down. The control had the button in the hero section. Variation B opened with a problem agitation solution opening, which is kind of odd on homepages.

You usually just lead with the solution on a homepage and then you might try to back up and go into problem agitation solution as a framework. But we were like, “Nope, we’re not going to lead with the solution. We’re not going to put that button in the hero section. We’re going to lead with the problem. No button. We’re going to agitate the problem, still no button. We’re going to talk about the solution, and only when we’ve said enough about the solution will we put the button on the page.”

I actually just wrote about this on the site. We saw 45% more paid conversion when we did that. More products purchased — not just clicks, but products purchased — when we moved that button down and made people feel something first. The question is, where do you need to put the button? It obviously depends on where your prospect is at, but I would say be sure to be confident in your ability to move people to click, but don’t let them click whenever they feel like clicking. That’s part of having that button test.

Jerod Morris: Wow. That’s great stuff, right there.

Joanna Wiebe: It was fun.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I bet it was. As I mentioned before, your session title is going to be “How to Make Good Copy Great When Selling Digital.” I want to talk a little bit about what that means, making good copy great. But not just for any reason, for any type of copywriting, but specifically when it comes to selling digital goods. Are there specific elements — and I think you just hinted at some right there — but are there specific elements to writing great copy for selling digital goods that may be different from other types of copywriting?

Why Copywriting Fundamentals like the Rule of 1 Still Work

Joanna Wiebe: I have found that selling digital goods has more to do with traditional direct response copywriting than not. Using the old tried-and-true rules that we read about from Shorts and Caples and all those awesome dudes — those still work. Those still completely and totally work. It’s when we pretend that the rules have changed that we harm our conversion rates.

There’s this sense that people buying online or people reading online are these completely different thinking beings that don’t follow any of the old rules and can’t be persuaded the old ways so we’re going to just throw stuff at them. They like to look around so let them look around. But we haven’t found that that’s been anywhere near as successful as controlling the flow of information.

That comes out in different ways. Sometimes it will mean we take a long-form sales approach and we put it into a “palatable” form on the page so it doesn’t look like a long-form sales page. It still acts like those old sales letters, it just doesn’t look like a letter. When it comes down to it, it’s really about those formulas and frameworks and just listening to your prospect and repeating what you heard on the page. That goes a long way. You think back to Great Leads and books like that, where they talk about basically what I’ve summed up. I don’t even know if it was from the book, I read it so long ago.

The rule of one, where you’ve got one reader, one offer, one big idea, and one promise. If you still follow those when selling on a landing page — it’s hard