High Conversion Copywriting

Copywriters are often expected to create sales miracles from the content they generate. Yet, with conversion rates lower than 1%, we know there aren’t too many copywriters hitting sales home runs.

Others will say high conversion copywriting isn’t that important because “either you have what the customer wants or you don’t.” Still, it is believed that your copy is the voice of your brand and creates the real human experience on your website. Hiring a strategy minded copywriter is a wise decision.

Clarity About Copywriting

Perhaps the key point regarding high converting copy is clarity — understanding the action you want the customer to take, and what key benefits will get them to buy.  With that laser like clarity, you might make it easy for those who like your offering to make a purchase decision.

Writing with purpose and impact are vital to capturing and nurturing your most qualified leads and to keep them loyal for years.

You’ll find all sorts of conversion copywriting successes online and about how they did it, sometimes with just gimmicks and no real insight.  But the real goal is to uncover a repeatable process that will power up your lead funnel with good leads and nurture them through the right content. Gimmicks could undermine everything you’re doing and damage your brand.

Being Patient and Thinking it Through

Let’s clarify right now.  We begin with:

1. understanding of your market and customer
2. discovering your unique value proposition and key benefits
3. planning content that will deliver a persuasive content experience

With that, we can create impactful, entertaining copy that excites your customer and makes buying the logical outcome. That end goal is weaved into the copy throughout.

This is what editing is for — to refine the copy until the message of value and action is ultra clear.

As discussed in the conversion rate, CRO tips, excite your customers, brilliant content strategy and other posts, web copy has a lot of jobs. Big pressures, and lots of moving parts so to speak.  This is why strategy is so important.  Strategy cuts the noise and focuses the message, thus magnifying its impact. The more people you write to, the less effective copy is. That laser like focus is hard to achieve.

As copywriters edit and clarify the message, sales conversions will grow.  The focus on clarity, making impact, nurturing the path to conversion, and increasing sales rates is what makes copywriters so valuable.

High conversion copywriting isn’t a thing, but is instead a process that builds intent and encourages the sale

Conversion Copywriting

I came across the term conversion copywriting via a post by Rachael Pilcher of Tacoandbean.com. I was  pleased to see someone had delved into the high conversion copywriting subject deeply and professionally and offered up some actionable suggestions.

Rachel describes conversion copywriting as a “persuasive writing style that aims to make the reader take a specific action” — and buying a product/service is what we’re really talking about. In the end, it’s all about revenue.

Regardless of the type of content or kind of experience the reader will have, the goal is to bring focus to their visit and get them excited about achieving their goal – which is the satisfaction from committing to a purchase of a product/service. Focus on their satisfaction which proves they’re making the right choice.

The fact they’ve arrived on your website says volumes.  In their mind, they’ve already made the purchase decision. They want validation of their decision.

For instance, you’ll hire me when you’ve achieved clarity about the end value for you regarding my collection of services. You’re going to add up the value of SEO, deep authoritative content, social media exposure, and visitor engagement and excitement. It’s only when it’s apparent to you emotionally that this traffic, improved UVP, and lead generation has big $ value, you’ll make the call.

You were thinking you needed a staff of 3 to do this, yet you may be able to do this, adopt AI marketing software and hire fewer marketing staff. One less salary is a significant benefit if you can get good results.

Taking What is and Making it Way Better

But let’s not pretend that creating high converting copywriting and related content is easy. And your copywriting isn’t the whole customer experience.  It’s just part of the context of their visit.

Copywriter’s don’t create our client’s value proposition.  It is what it is. The danger is trying too hard to shore up weaknesses instead of showing a commitment to value.  Copywriters describe it in a way to make it more relevant, exciting, personalized and satisfying to visitors.

Guiding the Sale

Conversion copywriting is a style of writing strategically designed to support the value proposition, convey information, support intent, use the right tone of voice, brand aligned, and is persuasive. And it’s a natural narrative that customers can relate to.

And you’ll ask, what is this persuasion thing? It’s like a guy courting a girl where he has to make himself appear to be the guy she’s looking for and wants. Of course, there is a difference between him and the vision she has. But he still has a chance!

Same with a Web visitor. They have an idea of the right solution already, so we use our copy to move them gently to our way of thinking, hit on the key benefits, show that it has the key ingredients, and make the conclusion seem natural for them.

The success of that content pathway, depends on the depth and accuracy of your customer profile, the immersive experience you can create (photos, illustrations, charts, videos, and stories) and your ability to achieve the voice that this visitor likes and respects.

Business owners/clients believe this is easy, yet it’s difficult. The key point is that you must know your customers intimately. You need to speak to real customers and find out how they use your product/service and what they expect and believe, analyze their online behavior, and figure out what content experience will cause them to buy.

You don’t really know. You have to experiment and find out. Success is in the testing.

3 Tasks in Conversion Copywriting Strategy

Rachel developed a 3 point plan to use:

 1. Discovery and Analysis — collecting industry research, reading designer’s creative brief, studying competitors, interviewing staff and sales people, analyzing web data, running a survey, and reviewing heatmaps and content pathways used by customers.

This means knowing exactly what the product is and why people want it, the stages of their awareness and buying cycle, and why specifically, they want your product/service more than alternatives available. You must understand the UVP expertly. Often, the copywriting is shallow and shows little expertise in the subject, which may be dismissed by readers who are experts in that subject.

 2. Writing and Wireframing — wireframing is when you map customer actions and progress through the content funnel pathway. By breaking it down visually into content touchpoints and decision points, you can better understand the customer journey and create persuasive content to assist them. The wireframe can help you map out key aspects of the customer journey/experience so you avoid losing them. Those gaps in flow are another source of sales disappointments and cart abandonment.

3. Testing and Optimization — after you’ve published your content and have either organic or paid traffic coming through your website, your analytics will give you an idea of its performance. Your analytics tagging has to be good so you can determine exactly what happened. Without definite detailed analytics, you can’t figure out what to improve.

Web analytics packages will help a lot. There is a new generation of AI analytics solutions that offer predictive insight and personalized real time delivery. These systems provide perhaps the biggest benefit of AI marketing software.

The point is that analytics, testing and rework is vitally important to improving sales rates.

Tips for High Converting Copy

• know exactly what you need to accomplish for that page
• choose one key theme or purpose for your page
• don’t overwhelm — keep to the key, most important ideas/value to get across
• use a strong hook to keep them reading
• make your offer or UVP irresistible and easy to comprehend
• ensure they can move through the content logically to avoid big gaps that break their concentration
• use meaningful, relevant headings
• align your copy so it points to the sale not to other things
• make sure you use good, relevant visuals that build emotional impact
• use the keywords they type into the search engine
• continuously mention the key benefits so they never lose the trail
• ensure the font is readable and comfortable for that audience
• show your proof points and allude to them so they remember (short term memory is 7 seconds)
• include something technically important so they see your authoritativeness/knowledge
• include a trial close to simply get them moving forward psychologically to buy or contact you

Customers Are Individuals and Unique

Much of the failure of copywriting today is due to the fact that your customer base is unique. They’re young or old, male or female, from different cultures, have different lifestyles, needs and occupations. They’re all unique.

So one copy fits all strategy usually fails. Without AI, you can still create multiple unique paths and let visitors segment themselves through the path they choose. By choosing the path for each kind of customer, you’re getting them to identify themselves and give you insight.

AI marketing systems should integrate that manual technique rather than try to figure it out themselves via the visitors behavior and choices. AI marketing software might try to do too much given that it is hard to know a lot about all your visitors. It is often impossible to learn that much via their website visit.

Successful copywriting might come back to experience, creative talent, and strategy. Just use these and keep working until you find a good combination that increases sales and return visits.

Gord Collins | Advanced SEO Strategy | Search Engine Optimization | AI Marketing | Digital Marketing Performance Audit | Marketing Services | Content Strategist Job Description | Calgary SEO Service | Conversion Rate Optimization | Real Estate Marketing San Diego | SEO Services San Diego | Content Strategy | Excite Customers | Marketing Agencies in California |  Contact AI Marketers