Transcription
Keeping with users at the center of our theme here, where I'm really excited to bring up our next speaker to the stage to talk about how the customer should be at the center of your copy experience as well. Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and CH Agency. We're fast-growing startups transform timid messages into standout, scalable digital salespeople. She's no stranger to the stage. She's taught conversion copywriting to over 100 international stages, including Marketo, Inbound, Conversion XL Live, Search Love, and now the Google Conversion Summit. So, welcome Joanna.
Okay, cool. Thanks. Thank you very much. Hello. Got chopsticks somewhere. I know I'll be using it throughout. Okay, so yeah, we've been hearing a lot about empathy and listening and all of that fantastic stuff. But what a lot of us don't know is that when you're doing all of these great listening exercises, you can take everything you learn there and use it to write really badass copy too. So I'm gonna talk to you today about exactly how we do exactly this: taking voice of customer data, everything you're collecting as you're building brands and doing other stuff, and actually turning it into copy that speaks directly to your prospect.
I'm just gonna make sure this works. So we're at a place where when we talk about writing copy, if you write copy or if someone on your team writes copy, you might have heard that, you know, you want to write copy that people see themselves in. That's why we use voice of customer data to write that copy so you can actually see themselves in the words that you're using. But it's not just themselves. It's actually their current and immediate next selves. That's like one of the bigger things to keep in mind when you are listening to voice of customer data: what do people believe about themselves today, and what do they want immediately next?
So a really clear example is if you're selling weight loss solutions like Weight Watchers. The immediate next version of oneself is like, "I lost three pounds seven days later. I lost eight pounds a week or two weeks later." Versus, "I lost 300 pounds in three years." That's like way down the road. It's a really hard thing to sell people on. So we want to listen for things that speak directly to who we are now and who that immediate next version of our customers are going to be once they use our solution. So we have to match where they are and then show them their next selves.
But how do we get there with voice of customer data? So we talked about using VOC a lot, but when it comes down to it, it can be kind of hard to actually know how to do that in practice. So you can do a survey and you can have all this great qualitative data in it, and now you're supposed to write an ad that drives to a landing page, which we'll see use voice of customer to make that happen. But what do we normally do instead? Do you go straight to the survey data and start taking what you're learning in that data and putting it on the page? Or do you do the thing where you sit around in a boardroom?
So, as a little exercise, Mr. Rogers, fantastic man. Tom Hanks is pretty good, and I'm looking forward to the movie. If you guys don't know what I'm talking about, Tom Hanks is gonna be Mr. Rogers in a movie about him. And if you don't know Mr. Rogers, I am very sorry for you, 'cause he was like, you know, instrumental for making me who I am. Thank you, Mr. Rogers. Learned a ton about, you know, life from him, but also, yes, about writing copy.
So Mr. Rogers, when he sits down to write a song, he does something that, or did do because he's passed now. His life is a little bit, the way that he approached it would be a little bit differently from how we would. So we were to sit down to write a song for kids, which was Mr. Rogers' whole job, what would we do? It's time to write a song for kids. What do you do? What are you write about? What do kids, what do kids want a song about? Any ideas? Sometimes, right, we might say, "I don't know." In the first place, now the people are like, "Well, they like Tandy and cats and things like that."
Mr. Rogers, of course, spent his life listening to the children that he was going to make songs for and he was going to speak to. And so the opening line for this song is, "What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite?" Where did that come from? Did Mr. Rogers sit around thinking, "I think this is how kids talk"? Then kids say this? Or did he actually go out and listen? And this is absolutely an actual snippet that a child said to him: "What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite?" You can feel everything going on with that kid, right? That kid has a red face, he is worked up. "What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite?" And he made a whole song out of this, not by sitting around and imagining, "What do kids think about? And what do they care about? What do they want to hear a song about?" But by actually listening to them.
So what if we were to do the same sorts of things? We could have real impact, not just some weird little thing that some little message that nobody cares about, but something that actually gets through to people. So the Mr. Rogers school of songwriting goes something like this. It's a little formula. You take what your audience says, you do the things that make it into a song. So you make it rhyme, you layer it over music, and then you have something that is ready to put out in front of people and see if it works. You sing it to kids, see if they like it. Sing it again. Sing it a little differently. You put it out there.
So we can do the same things that Mr. Rogers would do, but we can do it with our copy. So we take what our audience says, the things that they're saying, like sticky language they use, that stuff that when you hear it, it sounds different from what you would say, or from what your boss wants you to say, or from what you would say in a boardroom as you're all sitting around thinking about what should our message be. So you want to listen for the sticky language that people use, the themes and the messages from the voice of the customer. So we're doing that in all sorts of different forms, and we'll get into how then you push it through. You make it into copy. You write. You push it through copywriting frameworks and formulas, and you apply those better practices, and then you come up with validation-ready copy. Same formula Mr. Rogers uses. We're gonna try it ourselves.
Instead, validation can look like internal validation, where you're like, "Okay, as a team, can we use some sort of heuristic analysis to identify if this copy is on track or not?" And then external validation is actually putting it out there, doing A/B tests, things like that. So here's an example of how that works. So we were working with a rehab center a couple years back. We were rewriting their homepage. Okay, how do you write a homepage headline for a rehab center?
So we went over to Amazon. Amazon is a great place to go. Anywhere that you can find word reviews at all. Amazon is just a really, like, natural example. But anywhere you can find reviews that people leave about products that are similar to yours, and if you're not selling a product, then something that they're hiring to do the job they should hire you to do or your solution to do. So we looked at like six different books on alcoholism, on dealing with people who are addicts. And it wasn't the books that we looked through. It was the comments that people left, the reviews that they left about the books. Reading through hundreds, sometimes, but really quickly to get to a place where we finally heard this: "What I learned is this: If you think you need rehab, you do."
So this was something that stood out to us. Nobody else was really saying anything like this. "What do you mean? If you think you need rehab, you do." So we pushed that through a really simple framework, which is actually sounds pretty good. Over to do much to it. So we didn't do much to it. We just did, "If you think you need rehab, you do." We turned it into a headline for the homepage. We tested it against the control, which was just a really basic, straightforward, like, "Come to our rehab," kind of thing, against a testimonial, and against a data point. And internally, our validation, we were like, "Okay, let's vote. Which one do we think is gonna win?" And we did, like, we took bets. And nobody bet on this one. I didn't even bet on this one, and I wrote the damn thing. "If you think you need to rehab, you do." Is like, "No, it's not gonna work. It's too different. It feels wrong."
The real thing that's going on here, and I'm gonna get into the results of it, was our internal validation. We're asking ourselves, when we're writing copy that converts, you want to ask yourself, "Is this so far out of our comfort zone that it could either be a huge breakthrough or like an embarrassing giant bust? Is it so different from what we are used to? Is it going to make everybody around us so uncomfortable?" Some will think this is a, this is a sure winner, and others will think this is going to, like, embarrass us publicly. You don't know the answer, and that's a good place to be at. Test copy. Almost none of us ever get there. Like, who gets there and runs that test? It's a very scary thing to do. But we try to do that. We aim for that. This was different enough. No other rehab centers were saying anything like this. And so we went with that. We tested it. Nobody thought it was gonna win. We went with it anyway. And of course, that turned into our story that's going backward to the winner, right?
So we had a big breakthrough on this one. When we tested it on the homepage alone, we had 400% more clicks through to the next page. And on the next page, which was the lead gen page, 26% more leads completed. They're all attributed to this one headline change, which is a really big deal, a really good breakthrough. And importantly, nobody thought it was going to work. Nobody thought it was the one. But we took the language from what customers are actually saying and we used that. You took a chance on actually listening to your customers and just using their own words to convert them. Because why would our words work better than their words to convert them? It doesn't make any sense. Of course, their words are more likely to work than ours are.
Okay, another example for e-commerce. Anybody e-commerce in the room? SweatBlock is a solution. I don't know if it is heard of it, but SweatBlock is a little towelette that you use if you have hyperhidrosis, which is you sweat a lot. You sweat behind your knees, you sweat on your hands, you sweat on your face, you sweat all over the place. So we went through the reviews for this moist towelette, SweatBlock, and there were 5,000 of them on Amazon. Just a lot. So we had a lot of data to work with. And people were saying the usual things, but others were giving us interesting insights like, "I sweat all the time. It doesn't even have to be hot out. I'm sweating even when the AC is on." It was like, "Okay, alright, cool. We're listening. We're paying attention."
And we pushed that, what we were hearing, through some pretty good best practices. Like, can we take that and keep it in the first person? Put it in quotation marks? Make that the headline? That's a really good practice for your headlines: first person in quotation marks. And can we lead with a visceral problem on the page? So we're writing a landing page where you normally start with a product shot. And we were like, "Let's not start with a product shot. Let's start with the problem shot." People are sitting here thinking this horrible problem they have about sweating even when, like, it's not even hot. Oh, there's no excuse for sweating.
So we took that, pushed it through those better practices. I wrote this headline: "It doesn't even have to be hot. Oh, my armpits are always wet." Now, if you are somebody who deals with this problem and you read that headline, that's gonna speak a lot better than somebody you're just saying, like, "Be dry," or something like that. Breakthrough: 50% approximately more paid conversions. Okay, cool. So we're seeing that there might be something to this. It doesn't mean you're always gonna win when you use voice of customer data, but it's so much stronger to base hypotheses on if it comes from VOC.
So we do this all the time. We did this with Wistia for their emails, where we had 350% increase in paid conversions for them. Nearly 20% drop in churn for Canva. We had our own huge launch doing this stuff. So we do this stuff all the time. That's all it is. Build up. So you know that we do this all the time. We test all the time. We're learning interesting things as we go. Now, when it comes down to it, I can say, "Oh, here's the voice of customer, and here's how we turn it into something," and tell you, "Go." But how do you actually do it? How do you walk away from this and either go write the copy yourself using these techniques, or help your copywriter or your agency, whoever you work with, follow this process? You can use actual copy that's based on what customers actually think and care about.
Okay, so we're gonna start with actual research. So some of the more obvious, well-known research you might do is interviewing customers, doing surveys of new customers, ex-customers, existing customers, segments of them, on-site polls, all of this kind of stuff, follow-me homes, user tests, etc. What a copywriter adds, because we're listening, we want qualitative data wherever possible. We love to add interviewing the founders. So the owners of the company or the founders of the company. They are, as I see it, the original customers. They're the ones who felt a pain so viscerally, so like intensely, that they decided to build a solution for it and go out on a limb and start their own company just to solve this problem. So you want to interview the founder. Thank you page surveys. Big deal. We'll get into thank you page surveys. UserTesting.com gets a bit of a bad rap in the conversion world, and I don't really know why. We learn tons of great stuff, and they have actually a lot of users that you can segment and actually use. Mining sales call recordings. Does anybody here do sales calls in their organization? Yeah, a few people. Enterprise in particular will do sales calls, and if you can get your hands on sales call recordings, they are a goldmine. Like, I can be the laziest person alive because, like, copywriters, what are these? Sorry, these people will actually do my job of telling me exactly what words to use in these sales calls.
So I'm gonna show you how we mine sales calls. Mining support tickets. It's really easy. I'm sure everybody already has support tickets sitting somewhere that you're just not referencing. Mining Facebook comments too. And this is like, the list goes on from here. But there are a lot of different things you can do. The ones you should focus on are, of course, interviewing customers. I wouldn't do a project without interviewing customers. Interviewing the founders. Thank you page surveys. UserTesting.com. Mining sales call recordings, as well as online review mining. Just because review mining is like, you could do it right now. Like, you could stop everything, go over and look at products that are similar to yours, or that you know your customers are hiring when they should be hiring you to do the work or your solution to do the work. You can go over there and look at right now and start the job, the job, like, immediately.
Okay, so with that understood, those are like what we're working with to find voice of customer data. How can we apply it in real life? Okay, so we use interviews galore. Interviews are a big part of our process. We use it to find the story. So that's like the "why" for any Simon Sinek fans in the room, the value proposition, and the big idea. And you can do so much more with interviews. But this one I'm going to actually show you. So founder interviews in particular are really useful. So if you were to try to identify a value prop for a solution, here's how we run founder interviews. So you have the interview on Zoom. This is like, really practical, like exactly how to do it. Five steps. Have the interview on Zoom, on video, whatever. And Google Hangouts, whatever it is that you guys use, as long as there's video on. You don't have to be in the same room with a person. You don't have to make it awkward. Just get on video. And if they're not on video, that's cool, but you have to be on video. Take directional notes during. So don't take notes about what they're saying, but take notes about what ideas they're bringing out for you that you can then follow up on during the interview. Record the call with permission, of course, because then if you don't record the call, you have to take a lot of notes, and you want to be listening more than anything. So make sure that you record the call. And if you can't record the call, have somebody else there to take notes for you. If you can record it, use a solution like Rev.com to transcribe it, and then print and read the transcript with a highlighter. It's really straightforward, and it's like a must-do.
So we were working in a lot of examples in here are going to be for a solution called GetPrime. Is anybody familiar with GetPrime? No. It's basically Google Analytics for engineers, how they describe it. So a lot of teams, like sales departments, marketing departments, have KPIs or have ways of measuring if you're doing your job well. Engineers don't really have that, and they get a lot of attention from, you know, the CFO in particular, who's like, "Are we getting the value out of the engineering team or what?" So GetPrime was invented by engineers to help measure engineers, which sounds bad to some, to engineers in particular. And so we had to kind of work against that. So we were looking for the value prop for this solution, and I interviewed the founder. And one of the things that he said is, "I always start with the assumption that most engineers love building." You know, in a good way, the good stuff, building stuff. But I always start with the assumption that most engineers love building. Okay, what do I do with that? That stands out. That's good. A lot of things stood out in the interview, but that one in particular is like, "Oh, I'm cool. Write that down. Come back to that later."
So I took it. I wondered, "Might this be like at the core of their value prop?" So I took it. I pushed it through some frameworks for actually writing a value prop. Like, you want to speak something that's unique and highly desirable. You want to suspend disbelief a little bit. That gets into a big idea. And you want whatever that value prop is, it's customer-facing, to be memorable. And that turned into, "Engineers build business." Okay, is it good, though? Like, is it actually gonna work out there? So we had to validate it. So we do our internal validation, and then you do external validation. Again, internal is just looking through with different heuristics that you have for yourself. So in this case, we're like, "Okay, we have four different markets for different segments of people that we're going to talk to. Will this work for all of them? Will it work for stakeholders, the executive stakeholders, story, senior engineering leaders, engineering operators, and actual engineers?" Yes, we all believed that it would. Everybody involved in this project believed that it would. "Will it speak across all of the five pirate metrics for SaaS: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referrals?" The answer was yes. It will carry us through, carry a person through all of those things. This belief that engineers build business might be big enough to carry people through and keep them investing in the product. So we're cool with that. We felt validated with that. We put it out in the market, and it works really well. So they put it everywhere, like you will likely do with a value prop. And this came not by us sitting around saying like, "What, what sounds cool?" Coming up with taglines and things like that that you might do, but really just listening instead of trying to insert ourselves in the conversation.
Second, and this is a little detailed, so we use sales calls like crazy and demo recordings like crazy for plotting sequences and hierarchies. Basically, any funnel. Does anybody work on funnels in here? Some. It's super dark out there, and I can't see anything. I'm gonna go with everybody put up their hands. Okay, cool. So everybody works on funnels. That's great. But when it comes to actually working on a funnel or working on writing emails that say, so if you write ads that drive to landing pages or to lead gen pages, and people then become email leads, you have to write emails to nurture them, right? How do you do that? How do you come up with that? How do you actually plot a funnel? You can say, "Guys, I want a funnel for this ad that we're doing." Um, how do you actually put one together? How do you know what goes in everything? There's a lot inside there. What message should come first? What's the first thing we should say to somebody? And then second, and then keep going after that. And what's like the actual order of them, like everything inside of it? So we have to plot the emails, and then we have to write them with stuff in all of them. And you can imagine that a lot of people don't end up putting that many funnels together because you're like, "Oh no, I don't know what goes in anything." So I'm kind of good. We'll see if we can find somebody to hire to do that. And they don't want to do it either. So it's a really straightforward thing if you're willing to, like, block off some time to listen to some sales calls, which we do, and what you should do.
So Chorus.ai is a platform for recording sales calls. There are other ones out there, but this is just the one that most of our clients use. And in this case, it's what GetPrime uses. I'm gonna give the GetPrime, continue on with GetPrime as our primary example here. Okay, so you want to go in and just purely watch old demos. That's it. That's where your copy is gonna come from. You're watching the demos, watching these videos, watch their expressions as they see the demo happening. So the person who's being demoed to, it's gonna be quiet a lot of the time in earlier calls, and you're gonna have to just, like, pay attention to whether they look really bored or not. You want to skip to the parts where the prospect is talking. So you can't really see it there, but I'll let you know that there's a teal bar followed by like a little purple bar. The teal represents the agent talking, and the purple one is where the person being demoed to is talking. So you can, like, skip right to the purple stuff, see if it's like an interesting question, and then back up a bit, but you don't have to spend all your time, like, just watching everything. And of course, watch it on 1.5x.
Make notes to yourself throughout as you're watching these sales demos. So I have like a little notepad open on my computer, and I'll take notes throughout, putting things in quotation marks. And if it's a note to yourself, if it's something you want to remember, I find it really useful as like a tip to put your notes to yourself inside all caps, so you'll know it's you editorializing or thinking about something. And then put interesting language in quotation marks because that's the kind of stuff that you're going to actually use to write the copy later.
Okay, we want to also watch for documentary-style moments. Is anybody familiar with Jobs to Be Done? Little, I heard a whisper. Yes. Okay. It was everybody knows. In this case, it was just one person. Okay. So anyway, I won't get into the details there. But when you're interviewing people, when you're listening to people, you want to kind of get them to speak to things that are like bringing their life to life for you. A lot of people talk at the surface level, and you have to get people to dig in and zoom in on what their lives are actually like so you can really write copy that's not summarized, but it's actually like deep into how they're thinking. So you want to watch for any documentary-style moment, which is a moment in a sales call when you can visualize the person's life, when something real happens, or they're not just say, "Oh yeah, that sounds good," but like, "Oh, I could see that's working like this," and getting into those details.
So here are some notes. You're gonna take a lot of notes when you do these, and it's all great because it's all useful. Um, one thing that came up, what that was a documentary-style moment. This person said, "Oh, I didn't realize Martin was spending three quarters of his time continually reworking every line of code every time this particular requirement changes." So this is something where I can now start to see this person's life. Martin, whoever Martin is, was spending three-quarters of his time continually reworking every line of code every time this particular requirement changes. This is interesting because we can kind of get an insight into their life and possibly lives of people like them. So when we're going to write about a pain point that we want to like zoom in on, we can use like this exact language. And you can even use the name Martin if you want to in your copy because it makes it again more real. But really just zooming in and taking this. We don't know what we're gonna quite do with it yet, but when it comes time to discuss pain points in our copy, here you go. You can lift this and drop it into an email.
Watch for phrases like, "I'm worried about," and "Can you show me?" That's something that's gonna be really useful for you when you were actually plotting anything to do with their concerns, their objections, and things like that. So in this case, I'm gonna zoom in on a couple of these. Don't worry, you, I won't read all of them. They're quite long. But this one gentleman said, "I'm worried about the overhead, the overhead and the upkeep. Where does the data come from that GetPrime reports on? How much attention of my guys have to focus on this? Are the inputs intuitive? Do they make sense? They're gonna be real dry." And we kept going on. This is the kind of stuff that once you know that people who are in a good position to buy from you, who are actually like qualified prospects, they actually care at this point. He's having real thoughts, real interesting thoughts about possibly taking your solution and bringing it in-house. This is the kind of stuff that then I can plot out emails based on. Okay, what's his first concern? Overhead. Great. Email one is overhead. Second concern? Upkeep. Great. Email two might be upkeep. Where does the data come from that GetPrime reports on? That might be email three. So we start to watch for patterns. It doesn't mean we take one data, this one person, and plot our whole sequence on this. But when you can start to watch for these patterns and you can write out like one, three, four, five, six with their topics, then you can see for the next sales call, well, where are one, two, three, four, five, six? And as people start saying the same things, you can start seeing like, "Oh, early on, a lot of people are worried about where does the data come from that GetPrime reports on?" And that could be one of your very first emails. And now you're just not writing some random email because you were told you have to, but you're writing something that's actually going to tap in so that person who reads it feels like you're inside their head.
Another one is, "If it's too abstract, too cumbersome, too difficult and intricate for the guys to get trained up on, if it ends up being a data burden." And this person goes on about things that would keep them from buying. So they're at the far end of the spectrum when it comes to saying yes to you. And all we have to do is understand that, okay, when a person is close to buying, they start having these concerns. So when we're down funnel, we're putting our funnels together, some of the concerns that come up are likely to be these. And we do not have to bring those concerns up earlier, which could be problematic earlier in funnel. But we should bring them up later in funnel. We can start plotting out funnels just by listening to people. Lots of notes will come up. You don't. This is to illustrate that there will be a lot of notes. You know, to look at them. But importantly, if you do this work, and you should do this work, you want to make sure that you are tagging everything that you find. Put individual notes together. If you use Evernote or your story research or whatever it is that you might use. If something is an objection, tag it. Take it as an objection. If it's for somebody who's like a late awareness or late stage sort of person, that's a prospect for you. If it's talking about a moment of highest tension, a moment of highest pleasure, desirable outcome, whatever those things are. The more you do this, the more you'll be able to tag this confidently and then go back and use that. Because you could have all sorts of notes, but if you don't know how to use them, you're not going to use them. And you'll sit around on a boardroom table again and go like, "What do we say?" And we want to avoid that.
Okay, so we listened to tons of sales calls. We took thousands of words of notes. We overlaid the flow of each conversation to find patterns, as I mentioned. And then we used that to shape this funnel, which is a pretty straightforward funnel. It's actually refunds made in one. We can see that there are emails, landing pages, and then direct one-to-one emails as well. And they're all plotted based on what we learned, primarily what we learned in sales calls, and then we had that validated in other ways. We learned about confusion. We learned about pain. We took those and we put them into the actual breakdown of these eight emails. Those are the like round little circles, little gray ones, you can see there. Began with a desirable outcome. So what is, what do people most want out of GetPrime? Followed that with confusion. Yeah, but the pain point, then the point of confusion. This all came not from us sitting there and guessing, but from listening and watching those patterns that kept coming up in the way people would ask questions at each point as they went through.
Okay, so you have all of that that you can take and use to plot out a sequence. Now, how do you actually write the sequence? How do you get into it? It's gonna come down to desirable outcomes, sharp pains, and points of confusion. If you're earlier stage, we often jump to features and benefits. And when you're reviewing copy, you might also be like, "Where are all the features and benefits?" And you want to make sure that you're putting features and benefits down later in an email, like for emails that are product-aware people. Um, this is going to, when you're talking to people who are newer to your world, who aren't quite sure about who you are and if you're right for them, then you want to talk more about things that are not features and benefits, but what's really going on in their lives.
Okay, so how do we do that? How do we write those emails then? So one of the things that we heard is when we're in stand-ups, and an engineer has been stuck for weeks but thought he could figure it out on his own, and now we're late, so he finally brings them. Okay, that was voice of customer data. One person was talking about a problem that they had. We opened. We said, "Okay, great problem. Perfect. I understand that's your problem." We listened. We heard a lot of agitation points for that problem. And then, of course, how to solve it. If that's a framework, problem, agitation, solution, is a copywriting framework. So he took that voice of customer, we pushed it into problem, agitation, solution, and that helped us write this email. And I'll show you exactly how that breaks down, like how did the copy in this email actually get there. So it's one thing to plot all of the emails, but now how do we write those emails? So again, this is just taking VOC. So one of the person, one of the people said, "When someone commits a thousand lines right before the weekend in the context of no one will prioritize reviewing it, and it dies on the vine." That turned into, "Someone on your team commits three hundred-plus lines of code at once, and this dying on the vine." So it's starting to make its way directly on the page. "It's hard to know who the bottleneck is." That came up a lot. And "What's going on under the hood?" We heard that exact phrasing a lot. So this, and this is just a snapshot of all the different things that went into writing this email. And this email converts very well. We've already seen earlier conversion rates, but this is how we get there, just by not interrupting, not interfering with what people are trying to say to us about what they're really going through, and just putting exactly what they say on the page. Don't editorialize. Don't summarize. It just take it and put it on the page.
Okay, that brings us to the last way that I want to talk about today for actually finding voice of customer data and using it, and that's Thank You page surveys. So Thank You page surveys are my fave. We heard yesterday about how password confirmation pages were in the top ten for somebody. I forget the details on it, but it was like, "Yes, yes, because confirmation pages are a really under-optimized space in most of our experiences." So you can use a Thank You page or confirmation page. It's a great time to ask a question of somebody. You can put a survey on your Thank You page. You can put an ad on a Thank You page as well, but you can also put a survey on there. And the reason that a survey on a Thank You page is so good is because it's a seducible moment. This is the moment someone has just signed up and said yes to you. They've said yes to buying from you, or to signing up for whatever thing you have, or to downloading your app. And now they're left on, like, this Thank You page. It's like, "Great, go check your email and then use whatever we have there." So it's effectively a dead-end page, but you can do something with it. And with that really good moment of having just had someone say yes to you, and they're on a bit of a high.
Okay, so we want to put a Thank You page survey there. So we do this. We do this for all, for all of our clients. But we did also do it for ourselves with our own training. So immediately after a customer purchased Copy School 2018, they were brought to this page where we asked them this one question: "What was going on in your life that brought you to join Copy School today?" Okay, it's an open-ended question because we want to hear what people have to say. It's not a poll. It's not trying to get it down so that we can try to figure out what everybody thinks, but really listening to what people are gonna tell us. "Why did you buy from us? What was going on in your life?" And I've been using that exact phrasing for well over a decade, back when I was at Conversion Rate Experts, on my own, with all of my clients as well. "What was going on in your life that brought you to X today?"
We have copywriters who are our customers. So some of them would answer like, "A copywriter having a bad day might." So this person said, "Groping in the dark of uneducated purgatory, destined to be chained to low wages and toxic work environments, yet unwilling to surrender to the perils of the loser top." So not everybody is gonna answer that way. And although it does make for a little bit of an interesting moment when you're going through all of these responses, um, you're gonna find also some really useful ones too. So this one is, "I want to become a copywriter, but one of the right skills to start off my own business without feeling insecure in my abilities." Okay, "without feeling insecure." That's interesting. Then someone else talked about confidence, and suddenly everybody was talking about confidence. And others looked through this too, and they also mentioned this. It wasn't just like confirmation bias, but others on my team were going through, and it was like, "Damn, did we even know we were selling confidence?" We had no idea we were selling confidence.
So what did we do? We took that and we rewrote one of our final sales messages. We added that to our final day sales email. In this whole section right here, it's a longer email. It's okay. People read online. Um, and throughout this whole section, we just kept hammering home the message: "You'll be confident. You'll be confident. Confidence, confidence, ultra-confident copywriter swagger." We just kept pushing on that. And that was just because we heard from people that they were trying to get more confident in something. And if we haven't asked that question on the thank you page, we would not have known this. And there's so much more that you will get from this.
So big takeaway here, I hope for you, is that test-worthy copy is not sitting inside your head. It's not sitting inside my head. It's not sitting inside the head of any copywriter you might hire. And if they think that it is, don't hire them. It's in the hearts and in the minds of our customers and prospects. And your job, my job, our job is to lure it out, to listen, and to repeat it back in persuasive ways. And otherwise, just stay out of the way. So you want to take sticky language, themes, messages from the voice of the customer, push it through any copywriting frameworks and formulas and better practices that you or your team might know, and then validate that internally and go out and test it. We're a big validation point. Something to really think about as you do this is, "Might this lead to a giant breakthrough? Might it be a total bust?" And you don't know which one it is. That's a good one to test. That is all. Thanks, guys.
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We'd like to do just a couple questions. It's short. If the folks have them, I'll let me go grab the or you can come up to the mics. Thank you for the talk. It was very insightful and practical. This may be out of school, but those frameworks, how many are those? And is there a high-level message of the purpose of what happens throwing the when you run through the frameworks?
Um, yeah, so there are a lot of frameworks, or just like for testing and prioritization. We saw three maybe yesterday, um, with ICE being one of the really popular ones. So copywriting frameworks galore. We have a lot on CopyHackers.com about exactly that, like a giant list of all of them. But you really only need to know a couple. So I rely heavily on Problem Agitation Solution. That's like one of the frameworks that we use really heavily. And a lot of people don't dare to let people don't want to start with the problem because they think it's like fear-mongering or it's negative, but it all depends on how you do it. So Problem Agitation Solution is a really good framework. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is another really good framework. And what was the second part of your question around how, what happens with it? Yeah, and you know, what's the high-level purpose of running to those frameworks?
Yeah, and that's just to shape the copy. So if you took voice of customer and you just threw it on the page, like, it's not, it's not ready for public consumption yet. So you want to make sure that you're applying things like, "Okay, how can we organize this page persuasively?" So thinking about how people make decisions, how can we organize the VOC on the page in such a way that'll actually work? So the goal of VOC is to make sure that the customer sees themselves in your copy, their immediate selves, their current selves, in their immediate next self. But once the VOC is in place, like, how do you push it further so that it actually works? And that's the headline formula. It's best practices. Like, can we make it clearer? Like, "If you think you need rehab, you do." We had a couple words cut off the front because it was like unnecessary. So it's just a really quick, obvious better practice. And copywriting is like, make it clear. So that's really it. It's just to give you something to push the VOC data into. Does that help?
Okay, cool. Thanks for the question. To my right. Okay, I'm like, I don't see you at all over here. Okay, it's darker than you think. Um, for well, that turned into for Copy School. That was the one for Copy School with confidence. And it was, it's a launch. So you've got like a five, I think it was a six-day window. And it turned into a seven-figure launch. And it might have gone that way without the confidence messaging. It was a last-day message. You don't know if that's actually going to impact it. So it's less about that. Like, we didn't test that. And a lot of this stuff won't get tested because a lot of copy can't be tested. We want to test everything, but that's a myth. You can't test everything. And in that case, we could A/B test the emails for sure, but we didn't because we were in launch, and you're just like, "Just go and give everything to everybody," and you can't afford a delay. But yeah, it ended up being a seven-figure launch, and it was the first seven-figure that we've done. So I don't think it hurt. Matters. I literally don't know where I'm looking right now. So there's someone out there. Sorry, I couldn't make any eye contact with you throughout that whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, the question is like, how do you mentor a junior copywriter with like a creative background to write copy? And it's, it's admittedly very hard. I was an English major with a creative writing background, or a creative writing minor, so I was doomed for no job whatsoever. Anyway, so I kind of had some motivation, like, pay off them student loans. But for everybody else who just wants to be creative, it comes down to, I think, identifying that. And I really wish that the word "writing" wasn't included in "copywriting." You're not here to put on a show. You're not here to be clever. No one's interested in what you have to say. That's like hard, but it's like, it's true, right? If they think it's about themselves. And I had to have that broken of me too, and I'm a better person for it. But I do think like, you can just help them understand that their job is just a small fraction of copywriting is actually writing. So go study those frameworks and formulas and better practices, and that's where your art is. And everything else is the science of it, like listening, staying out of the way, validating. Again, that's you getting out of the way because you might find out that that copy you thought was super dope actually sucks and tanks. So yeah, those are the two science parts of it. And then they have a little room for artistry in there. And that's all they get. And then they can take their weekends to write the novels that they want to write, but that's not their job. I know it's tough love, but it turns them into better copywriters. Some will be like, "No, I don't want to do it," and then you'll lose them. But that's okay because they're probably not built to be a copywriter. I sound super mean. Marie, the copywriters. Okay, thank you. Cool. Thank you guys so much. Joanna.