CXL Scholarship — Conversion Optimization MiniDegree — Week 2 of 12
This article is the second in a series of 12 articles over 12 weeks that, I’ll be writing an article discussing my learnings in the CXL — Conversion Optimization Minidegree. I recently applied to the scholarship application program and was accepted. Part of that process is to write a weekly article discussing what I have learned in the previous week. I am a life long learner and every opportunity that I have to expand my knowledge in an area of passion is one I grab wholeheartedly.
CRO Mini Degree Total time approximation: 78h 59min
You can find more information here: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/conversion-optimization/
So this is week two and I’m continuing my way through the Foundations part of the course:
Product Messaging with Momoko Price
Product Messaging:
The bulk of my week was spent on this section. It’s a little over a 5 hour lesson that I picked away at in the evenings and mostly this weekend as I had a super busy week at work. I found this week tougher too because this material unlike last week’s was more new information to learn and absorb rather than review.
Copywriting and reviewing copy has always been a mix of mystery and talent to me. I can take time to craft a good business letter but I often felt that writing marketing copy was not something in my wheelhouse. As I mentioned in article one, I haven’t done a lot of copywriting in the past, other than B2B case studies. Most of my writing experience has been business documentation. Although, many years ago, I used to have a fairly popular blog that did allow me to explore a more creative copywriting side of me (no longer in existence).
What I loved about this course is how Momoko took copywriting and tackled it from a data-driven perspective so that anyone could start the process to creating amazing copy. She explains how copywriting tends to be opinion-based. There can be conflicting advice from different sources which leads to more confusion. Her framework takes out that confusion and provides a clear process that anyone can follow.
This is the breakdown of the lesson:
- How to Conduct a Copy “Teardown”
- Introduction to Message-Mining
- Minding Messages from Your Customers
- Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions
- Message Hierarchies
- Writing the First Draft
- Editing & Punching Up Your Copy
- Conversion-Focused Formatting & Layout
How to Conduct a Copy “Teardown”
Momoke explains her heuristic teardown model:
MEClab’s Conversion Sequence — I had never heard of this before. Apparently it’s a common marketing formula. The breakdown is actually quite simple to understand and makes complete sense. It’s not an actual mathematical formula, but rather it shows you the impact on the process.
Motivation is the most important factor but we can’t control that. However, we can control the Value, Incentive and Friction which can impact the Anxiety.
Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion breakdown is:
- Social Proof
- Authority
- Liking
- Scarcity/Urgency
- Reciprocity
- Commitment/Consistency
- Unity (us vs. them)
Hopkin’s Rules:
- Be Specific
- Offer Service
- Tell the Full Story
- Be a Sales Person
So based on these principles, we now have an understanding of conversion and persuasion. Momoka offers a better way to assess copy (tear down), which is to:
- 1. Base them on (yet to be dis) proven persuasion principles
- 2. Use them as a gap analysis tool, not a re-writing guide
- 3. They can’t tell you what will work — only what likely isn’t.
Introduction to Message-Mining
This section broke down explaining “swiping” copy from customer product statements to incorporate into our copy. This gives us authentic copy that speaks in their voice and blocks objections.
We can message mine to a google form to quickly add to when you find an online resource. Then it can be organized easily.
Mining Messages From Your Customers
We can gather really valuable insights from our customers through various Voice of the Customer methods. These include surveys, polls and one on one interviews.
Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions -
Everybody in marketing has heard about a Unique Value Proposition. The reason to buy, the reason to say yes. The so what.
Momoko explains how a good unique value proposition will address these items:
- What your customer’s want
- What your product does
- What’s unique about your product
Message Hierarchies
Creating a messaging flow for your sales copy has a lot of moving parts. I see even in my workplace, the time and effort that is spent on the sales page. It’s a very thoughtful process to address all the aspects as below. Essentially, start with the buy, let them try and end with the buy.
The audience’s awareness impacts this process. We have to understand the customer awareness to guide them through the story to get them through the solution.
Step 1: gauge visitor awareness
Step 2: define our value proposition
Low awareness — they are likely in a problem or pain aware mindset, so long copy will likely be needed.
High awareness — they are likely brand-aware, a returning customer and short copy, with easy ways to take action will likely be needed.
Writing the First Draft
This seemed like pure genius. It allows you to create a customer-informed, data-driven first draft of your sales page from raw customer-generated comments into compelling headlines, subheadlines and body copy. Essentially, you take the info collected in your spreadsheet data from before and it’s all organized/categorized by various categories that allow you to find the value proposition/anxiety, etc.to use in your copy.
Although, having gone through this whole process, it does seem labor-intensive for a small team.I think having a VA to do the message-mining and some aspects of the voice of the customer collection. Once that process is in place, I can see it being time-saving going forward but the initial process does look like it would be time-intensive.
Editing & Punching Up Your Copy
Clarity trumps persuasion. Above all, be clear. Using explicit marketing, not implicit.
“While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down the funnel, research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience”
— MarketingExperiments.com
Show and tell a story, use descriptive imagery.
Conversion-Focused Formatting & Layout
Not surprisingly, design factors can impact the effectiveness of copy on a page. It’s important to make your sales copy as easy to scan and read as possible.
- The position of each piece of copy on the page
- The size of each piece of copy on the page.
- What order you put your pieces of copy in
- The amount of space / clutter around your copy.
- The typography of your copy.
- Directional cues toward (or away from) your copy.
- Color contrast vs. background, imagery, buttons
Using software like Balsamiq (bare bones), Sketch (Mac only) and Figma (free) are useful for wireframing with copy. Type Scale is useful for checking comparisons of sizes of fonts.
I definitely feel like I need to go back and spend more time on some areas and play around with the tools provided. Momoka provided lots of valuable resources in google sheets of the templates for the message-mining. I wanted to apply some of the principles to this article, but honestly this was a long week with work and time was short so I had to get er done. I still learned a lot in the process and I definitely discovered where my gaps were and where I need to spend more time.
On another note, I’ve been thinking as I’m going through these classes, how are they A/B testing on us? They must be, right? I suspect that some of us may have different formats of our outline. I also could have sworn that the first time I watched one lesson, there was no captions on the videos, but the next time I went back, there was (although I could have had a brain cramp ;))
So next week, I’ll wrap up the Foundations side of the course.
