Transcription
[Music] told us to wait on the side of the state, but I felt weird waiting there. So hopefully there wasn't too weird to watch. Cool, thank you for having me here. It's so great to follow Ls when she's talking about this stuff, 'cause you get all excited. Except then my brain got all distracted with things I wanted to do, and I was like, "Focus, Joann, you have to go talk right now."
So there's lots to build on with what L said. So I love the curriculum for CXL. If this is your first time here, the curriculum is so smart, and everything just builds on everything. So I'm gonna build on what L was talking about with a particular focus on taking that voice of customer data, what customers are telling you, and actually using it to turn it into copy that is at least ready to be tested or ready to put out there, validated, and experimented with.
I think we all kind of know academically that we are supposed to do that. So if you read Conversion XL or you've taken any of their courses, like Momoko's course on copywriting, you've heard that you should take the voice of the customer and use it in your copy. Which is great, right? It's actually a nice, kind of lazy approach to writing copy. But how do you actually do it? Like, how in practice do you do it? And I can talk about this a lot about the whole concept of using voice of customer data. But when it comes down to it, I find that people have kind of a hard time, understandably, figuring out what to pull out of that voice of customer data, out of those survey responses, let's say, or the interview transcript. What do you actually pull out? What do you pay attention to? What do you use in your own copy afterward? So we're gonna tackle that today.
But if you didn't know that you're supposed to be using voice of customer data in your copy, that is 100% okay. I started out many, many years ago not as a conversion copywriter, but as a creative copywriter at an agency, tragically. But that was where I thought, and I actually took the job, and I remember telling, like, my friends, like, "I'm getting paid to write! This is amazing!" So I was an English major with like a Creative Writing minor. I was finally doing the thing that they tell you, like, "You can't do." One, I had a job. Two, I was able to actually get paid to write. Or so I thought. That was a big problem, and it took me years to get over this idea that I'm being paid to write. That's the opposite.
And I really wish that copywriting wasn't called copywriting, because the "writing" word is really misleading. It's actually, if you're doing it right, it's not about writing at all. Very little about, maybe 10% of the work of actually writing copy is writing. The rest of the work, 100, like 90%, everything else that adds up to 100% is just listening to customers. Because nobody cares about the English major's opinion on why you should buy that piece of software. Making it sound nice is completely not the point. And in fact, the nicer your copy sounds, the less likely it is to actually land with more people when we're talking about writing for websites and emails in particular.
So I want to walk you through how we go about taking voice of customer data and putting it on the page and getting our own voices out of it. Because that's not actually what we're in this to do, right? Our goal is to write copy that people see themselves in. But not just themselves. Not at all. Some, make sure we're on the same thing. Yes, we are. So not just themselves as they are. We're trying to help them see their current self and their immediate next self. Not the best version of themselves, but their immediate next self. The person who is just a step away from where they are right now. That's our job with copy. And I can't do that. I don't know anybody's immediate next self. I don't. I might have a sense for their first self, but not their immediate next self. And that's what I have to look to voice of customer data for.
So how do we actually go about doing that? We're gonna do that with voice of customer, of course, and going through the actual data. I'm gonna show you examples. Live? Not live. I'm not gonna, like, do the research lab, but you're gonna see the examples behind me. But in order to get there, before we even go there, let's pretend. Let's forget for a second that we're at, you know, we're in growth marketing, that we're part of this world of optimization on websites and in emails and things like that. Let's back it up a bit and let's pretend that our job instead, right here in this room, was to write a song. Okay? Your job is to write a song. You're being paid. Forget what everything else. You're being paid to write a song right now. This is a song for children. Say, for four-year-olds. So the four-year-old, what song do they need to hear? How do you write a song for a four-year-old? What are you making about? Any ideas? Unicorns? Sharks? Baby sharks? That's a much better shark. This is the optimum shark. Anything else? Sharks and unicorns, ice cream, playgrounds, princesses. Okay, lots of great things that we think about when we think about children, obviously.
Which is a great. What Mr. Rogers do is a really good rule in life to follow. I learned everything about copywriting, not everything, that's an exaggeration, but it makes for a good headline, from Mr. Rogers. This song, you might know. You might even know how the song came about. The song begins, "What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite somebody?" Did it make you grow up with this song at all? Remember it vaguely? Yeah. Where do you think this came from? Mr. Rogers sitting around going, "Kids love unicorns, to get here." Probably not, right? This was something an actual child said to him. "What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite?" That's like what kids say. That's what kids are thinking. That is language that when a child hears it, that other child gets it. They get, "Oh, I've been that mad before. I felt that. I haven't known what to do with my mad." They're not thinking of it as an adjective. They're not thinking of making it sound polished. No one's coming in and perforating this and saying, "Oh no, that doesn't work. It's got to work as like an adjective and a noun together." That's how we need to think about writing copy, too. That's at least my takeaway, one of many takeaways from Mr. Rogers.
So the Mr. Rogers school of songwriting goes: Take what your audience says, make it rhyme because you're writing a song, layered over music. Cut. You're writing a song. And then you've got a song that you're ready to put on your show. See how kids respond to it. We follow the same sort of process with copywriting. We take what our audience is saying in their actual language, not what we think they care about, not even the summarized version of what that qualitative data showed us. We take exactly what they say. We push it through copywriting frameworks and formulas and applying those better practices. And that's essentially where we leave it. Then we step back. And that's the copy that you test. That's the copy that at least goes out there into the world to be validated in some way.
For example, okay, so I've talked about this case study. I'm not gonna give it as like a full case study, but just as a couple examples of how that works. So on Amazon, you can go and look at all sorts of reviews. And there's actually pretty solid voice of customer data, loosely termed voice of customer data, at least in Amazon book reviews, in all reviews out there. This is just an example. So we were optimizing the homepage where a rehab center. This was a couple years back. And we read through six different, the reviews for six different books. And one of those snippets in there said, "What I learned is, if you think you need rehab, you do." Pulled that out. Applied some copywriting best practices, which is like, "Down. That's good. Just use it." And we wrote, "If you think you need rehab, you do." Then our job was to validate that, right? Before we just throw it out there, we want to validate it. And then of course, experiment with it. So lots of ways to validate. We're not gonna get into pre-experimentation validation today. But one of the rules that we follow, and people in my workshop earlier today heard about this already, is this idea of the breakthrough or bust.
Now, when you're writing copy, it can be a really scary thing to take voice of customer data and actually, like, use it in its raw form, just might like, modified lightly by copywriting best practices. Our job is to ask our copy, "Is this pushing things far enough that could either be a dramatic breakthrough or a total bust?" And we don't know which one that's going to be. If we can push things that far, internally agreeing on this, and then having the client agree as well, like, "This could go either way. This is different enough. It's still based on good data, so we believe it's gonna go in a good way, but it's so different that it could actually teach us something that's far different than we thought it was going to teach us." So the breakthrough or bust rule. Validation for that one. "If you think you need rehab, you do." Afterward, yes, we understood there was a breakthrough there. They had just ridiculous more clicks and more leads on the very next page as well.
Another example. This was also in my workshop earlier today, too. So SweatBlock is a product to help people with sweating issues, hyperhidrosis. So they had five, I think, five thousand reviews on Amazon that we just poured through them all. Just quickly fly through them, eliminate the ones and the fives, and this looks at the two, three, and four stars. And we saw things like, "I sweat all the time. It doesn't even have to be hot out. I'm sweating even when my AC is on." Okay. So we take ideas like that, the actual copy, put it through copywriting better practices here, like first-person headlines go in quotation marks. That's something that copywriters do a lot, myself included. And leading with a really strong problem, like something people are really likely to feel when they land on the page. That brought us to this headline: "It doesn't even have to be hot out. My armpits are always wet." That became the headline, based on voice of customer data, was just a little bit of tweaking there to apply those copywriting better practices. And that also led to, it was validated as a breakthrough with almost 50% increase in paid conversions. Okay.
So we're doing this stuff all the time. We're testing it across the board. I'm not gonna get into case studies throughout this. But we're doing, we're applying this all over the place with all of our clients and for our own business as well. This, what follows here, is not a bunch of case studies. This is actually how, now that you know that this can work, and hopefully, if you don't believe it, suspend some disbelief there for a while and at least put this into practice and see how it goes. This is about how we actually go and find those messages.
So what are we doing? How do you know what to pull out? Cool, obvious, really great ones that we go to when it comes to like the initial part where we're doing the research to just collect the voice of customer data in the first place. Interviewing customers, doing all of those surveys, everything else L was talking about. On-site polls, competitor audits might feel not like voice of customer, but we can discuss. And then follow-up emails and things like that. That's great. That's obvious. That's good. What do copywriters look for? I'm not somebody who's a market researcher. I'm a conversion copywriter. When I'm surveying, what I'm listening, I'm doing it for the purposes of better understanding my prospects so I can push that message back at them. So I'd love to add interviewing the founders who are actually the original customers, when you think about it. So if you work, I work with tech startups primarily. If you can talk to the founders, it can be very eye-opening about that initial itch that they had to scratch. And that's like the first customer where their pain was so strong that they decided, "I have to build something for this." So we love talking to them. Thank you page, confirmation page surveys as well. UserTesting.com. I really love for listening through the problems and objections that people have as they're list, like, as they're going through the details of the product. Mining sales call recordings. I'm gonna get into this pretty deeply here today. And mining support tickets, Facebook comments, and online review mining as well.
There are some that I will not live without and can't do a project without: interviewing customers. Got to do it. Can't live without it. Can't write copy without it. Interviewing the founders. Thank you page surveys. UserTesting.com. As problematic as it's can sometimes be. And variations of that. Mining those sales call recordings and online review mining. So we're gonna dig into three of these and how exactly we took what we heard and applied it in copy. So you'll know what to look for, too. Yeah, but I just want to be clear before we dive into that. Whenever just looking at one thing, we're gonna show you one, like, "Oh, here we did a sales call, we listened to a sales call, and then we did this." But we're trying gleaning all the time. So don't worry that it's like, "Oh, you only heard that once and then you turned it into copy." We're listening and listening and listening and listening. That's our whole job is listen. Take what we hear. Put it on the page.
First one. Okay, first thing that we use when we want to find the story. And a story can be a really big part of actually, like, optimizing an entire experience. It's like, what's that, why the value proposition and the big idea? So copywriters know that they're looking for a big idea. And that's often tied, we're like, to the value proposition at the brand or the product or whatever level that is. We use interviews for that purpose. When I know that I need to figure out the story, I'm definitely going to talk to the founder. And when I want to get down to the value proposition, again, I want to talk to the founder a lot of the time. So founder interviews are very good to do. Follow everything else said, obviously, about interviews. Here's how we do them, if it's helpful to you. We have the interview on Zoom, always on video. We're all remote, so I almost never see my clients in person. Sometimes I do try to avoid that, keeping just like staying in our little houses. So we have the interview on the Zoom on video, so you can see their faces, right? And they can see yours, and you can establish that trust. Take directional notes during it, but definitely don't take notes hard throughout. Record the call with permission, of course, so that you can then go and get that to transcribed. We use Rev.com to transcribe it. We spend a lot of money on Rev. I actually feel like I should get, like, a mug or something at least, sent from them. We spend so much money with them. And then you want to print out, sadly for the trees, but you want to print out and read the transcript with a highlighter. And when you're doing that, you might pick up things in the call itself that you'll jot down as you're like, going through and having that first interview. But when you go through and read through the transcript with founders, it can be extraordinarily eye-opening.
So you're, this is an example. I was working, I'm still working with a company called GetPrime. YouPrime is a Series A tech company that's essentially Google Analytics for engineers. 'Cause I was talking to the founder who was an engineer, and he wasn't able to, like, talk about how to measure his own team. He didn't really know how to measure his own team. So he went and he built the solution, which connects to GitHub. In the interview, Travis said, "I always start with the assumption." Sorry for the blue color. I think blue language, someone said earlier in my workshop, and I was like, "Oh, that's a neat way to put it." That was it's a quote, so it's not me swearing. "I always start with this assumption that most engineers love building ship." Okay. That's to doubt. That was different. That sounded a little different, first for many reasons, but it was like a different and kind of like, and insistently, you had to listen to him say that. It wasn't a soft message. You wouldn't sit around the boardroom talking this way, up around the boardroom table, thinking this way as you were coming up with messages. So I pulled this out. Put this through our process, right? Or like, really straightforward. Take a voice of the customer, apply things. Because I was looking for the value proposition in this case. So what makes a good value prop? Does it make you want to believe or suspend disbelief? Will it make, will it feel unique and highly desirable? And is it memorable? Okay. Take that, push it through that, essentially those filters. And then what came out on the other end was, "Engineers build business." Our job then becomes to validate that. Okay, engineers build because they love building cool stuff. And we couldn't see what he said. So we just took that and then put "business" in there instead. We validated it with breakthrough or bust, as well as with other ways that your client will be validating things internally. So we knew we had to solve for four groups. Would engineers build business? Solve for all four of those. And because we're incest, we have pirate metrics to worry about. So what it solved for acquisition, activation, and all of those. And would it at least carry through the whole way through? And we stacked that up against other value props that we also developed. And this is the only one that hit all five marks. Cool. We presented it to the client, and of course, then they ended up loving it. And it's now their homepage headlined, their Facebook, obviously, and then they're putting it all over billboards throughout Silicon Valley. So that's how we got to that point. Listen to what that person, that one founder says, and just pay attention to the things they say. I didn't have to do any work in there other than listening and paying attention, then applying really, really, really basic copywriting principles to turn it into what was next.
Number two, sales calls. Who uses sales calls? Who does like recorded sales calls? Some of us. They're amazing. They're like so underrated. But we use them for plotting sequences for emails, in particular. So if you use it, if you work in funnel optimization, we use them for that, for messaging hierarchies. And we can also pull a lot of like sticky language out of there to use in the copy itself. But what's really important here is that sales calls typically follow a similar process that is sometimes driven by the person who's like the rep or by the client when they decide to kind of take over because they have a lot of questions. So you can watch all of these sales calls and start to see patterns across them. Like, "Oh, here's the flow of things." Because the real question that I have for you is, when it comes down to it, and you're optimizing, let's say, a funnel, how do you know how to plot that funnel? How do you know what goes in what order? How do you know when to say X versus when to say Y? I'm not talking about when to offer an incentive, which to you might be like, "Oh, yeah, we'll do that way down funnel." When you're at the beginning of a funnel, in the middle of a funnel, or at the end of a funnel, and you've got emails to write and landing pages to write in there, how do you know what to put in them? I feel like that's not my job. Then you're like, "Super lucky." But if the rest of us, it's our job. So how do you actually plot that funnel? What message comes first? What comes second? Consistently? How will you know other than just plain guessing? The way to know is to listen to sales call after sales call after sales call. This is never time poorly spent. This is time extraordinarily well spent, even if it's hours and hours and hours. Because by the end of it, you will have incredible insights into the actual flow of the way your prospect is thinking when they are considering working with you and choosing your solution.
So we go through this. I recommend that you do use something like Chorus.ai or record calls on Zoom, whatever that is. You want to see the faces, the expressions of the people who are having the product demoed to them. That's huge. Because you will notice a lot of them will get distracted on their phones. And you know what's happening. It's really important to know that because you can say, "Okay, that point bored them. They didn't care about that either. We need to not include it or rephrase it." Moving up, you want to skip to the parts in Chorus.ai where the prospect is talking. You can kind of here, there's two colored lines. And the green one, which some people at close can see, that's where the rep is talking. And the purple, like dots, they're a recent customer. The client is talking. So you can zoom forward to those moments. You can also get a good sense for whether that's going to be a good sales call or not, because the rep was doing all the talking. But you can really quickly get into those moments and listen just to those moments, too. You'll probably find yourself backing up, but it can help you move through those sales calls more quickly if time is a thing.
When you're making notes here, this is how I do it, right? I want to share with you how I do it. It works repeatedly for me. If you have your own way, cool. If you don't, just do it this way. You're listening, you're watching the call, and you've got like your notepad handy. And this is like actually notes in Apple for me, in my MacBook. Notes to self, as I'm watching this, become all caps. So I will go back and pay attention to them. And then interesting language that the customer uses goes in quotation marks. Just do that. You'll be pausing a lot. You might already be doing this when you're doing like a UserTesting.com, when you're watching those videos, you're doing a lot of pausing and noting things. This is how I do and I find it very useful.
But what are you watching for? So it's one thing to just say like, "Oh, cool, I'm getting the flow of this. I get how people are talking." What are you really trying to find when you're doing this? What I recommend is you watch for, I call them documentary-style moments. So these are the moments that are so vivid, you could actually see them if you took it all out of context. If you gave that language that you read in the transcript or that you note down when you're actually doing the sales call, like when you're reviewing it, if you gave it to somebody, could they act it out? If you gave them that, could they act it out? And that's a really good moment. That's something that you can't come up with in a boardroom, and it's going to work really well when you put it on the page.
So here is one snippet of some of the notes that I took. I'm gonna pull out one example of that documentary-style moment. The client says, "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." This is us just getting into their heads, right? Like, what's going on? What matters to them? What they're paying attention to? And where can I go from this moment? So it's a really strong moment that can bring your copy to life in ways that almost no marketing copy is doing today. Almost no marketing copy would ever get this specific for all sorts of reasons that we tell ourselves that are kind of crazy.
You also want to watch for phrases like, "I'm worried about," and "Can you show me?" Those will come up a lot. If this were really, really good for when it's time for you to actually write copy. So there are a few of those in here. I won't read this all, but know that there's a lot there. And when you go back over these moments afterward, and you have to write a section about on your page about like overcoming objections, you'll actually know, "Okay, this person is worried about the overhead, the overhead and the upkeep." Okay, cool. I now know at least two objections that someone has. "Tell me more about that." I didn't have to. Because it's all in here. "Where does the data come from that GetPrime reports on?" Cool. I know that's a question. "How much attention or my guy is gonna have to focus on this or the inputs intuitive? Do they make sense? Is it gonna be a real drag?" This is all stuff that this person was just rattling through on the sales call. And when you're watching it and you're paying attention to it, you can also get the emotion out of it, too. Which is why sales calls are so amazing.
Another one. "If it's too abstract, too cumbersome, too difficult and intricate for the guys to get trained up on it. If it ends up being a data burden, I would definitely not want to use it." So what do I have to do now? I have to make sure that it doesn't sound too abstract. It doesn't sound too cumbersome. It doesn't sound too difficult. And it doesn't sound too intricate. And I have to know that my prospect is actually thinking it's gonna be all of those things. So my job now is just to keep listening to how I can actually pull away from him thinking that. And this comes out of notes after notes, notes, lots and lots of notes. Please never feel like you've spent too much time listening to a sales call. Keep listening more and more. Tag as L's said, take what you find so you can actually use it in your copy. So if you hear something that is an objection, take it as an objection. Late-stage desirable outcome, moment of highest tension, whatever that thing is. As you're listening to it, you'll start to see trends. And you'll wish that you had tagged things earlier. And you just want to go back and retag those. Spend that time to do it. It'll be okay.
So for this, I listened to dozens of, you know, nearly one-hour sales calls. It took hundreds of, sorry, thousands of words of notes. Then I took everything from those calls when I was trying to plot this sequence. I overlaid the flow of each conversation to find these patterns, which led to this funnel. And then I used common conversation flows to actually shape that funnel. So I'm gonna move through these parts fast, but this ended up being that the funnel. The funnel that came out of just listening to sales calls. And I knew what to put inside each of these emails simply because I listened to the flow of so many different conversations. And now I had the patterns to follow. Pretty straightforward. Side note for early awareness people, it's often gonna be a combination of like these desirable outcomes, sharp pains, and points of confusion that would come up a lot on sales calls. So those are just like quick tags for you to have, anyway.
So we pushed this through this one idea. When we're in stand-ups, an engineer's been stuck for weeks but thought he could figure it out on his own. And now we're late. So he finally brings it up. That was a voice of customer data point. Pushed through a framework, turned into a full email. This is the email that came out. And I'm just gonna show you exactly how it matches up. "It's time well-spent." Even though I'm looking at the timer. Okay, so voice of customer actual data. "When someone commits a thousand lines right before the weekend, when no one will prioritize reviewing it, and it dies on the vine." That exact language appears. Wait, right down here. "Someone on your team commits 300-plus lines of code all at once, and is dying on the vine." So the customer is writing our copy for us. "When it's hard to know who the bottleneck is." And that came in context. "The who the bottleneck is. You aren't sure of who's causing the bottleneck and what's going on under the hood." Came up tons in voice of customer data. "See what's going on to the hood of your engineering team." And that's just enough. That's all I can show you in this slide. The rest of it also comes from voice of customer data. Your job is just to listen and push that language right back at them. Because you're, it's not about you. It's not about your writing skills.
Ending off on this one. Thank you page surveys. So L has already talked about this. We, I love thank you page surveys. There is not a single client that we'll work with or have worked with in the last three years that I haven't done a thank you page survey with. We did this immediately after a customer purchased Coffee School 2018. That's our product. We asked him or her this one question embedded on the page. Like L said, "What was going on in your life that brought you to join Coffee School today?" This is a question, the back phrasing I came up with. And I was at Conversion Rate Experts. Well, "What's going on in your life that brought you to [blank] today?" Again, as L said, it's like directly tied. It just happened. So it's a really good time to ask people this. And they will answer this question. It's a very seducible moment. They just said yes to you. They like you. So we get lots and lots of answers to this. We're able to take what they're telling us and use it to write and optimize our emails for this particular campaign. We're talking to copywriters, so they somehow like exploring language when they're answering. So one 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 loserdom." Others, we're slightly more helpful with what they said. That was nice and entertaining. "I really like the break in the middle of the day." But others said the same kinds of words again and again. Synonyms for confidence. We saw confidence show up so many times. We're like, "Okay, that has to go in our sales emails." It was not in our sales emails prior to that. So we pushed confidence in there. We added a whole section on our very last day. And this was like our biggest, at the time, it was our biggest launch ever. And this is that section that gets into confidence. Just zooming in on it, you can see "confident, confident, confident, confident." You can't use the word too much. If it's a word your prospect gives you to use, you can't over-use it, honestly. So listen to what they have to say and use what they say.
That brings us just in time to the end of what I wanted to share with you today. But the real takeaway, I hope that you have, is that of course, as we say all the time, this test-worthy copy is not sitting inside your head. It's in what your customers are already thinking and what they're feeling. And they're telling it to us all over the place. All we have to do is listen, repeat it back to them, learn a couple of copywriting techniques, and then get out of the way. Just get out of the way. Take what they said and test it. And final validation, if you're really ambitious, will it be a breakthrough or will it be a total, terrifying bust? When you can answer that question with, like, "Yup," then you're in good hands. Cool. Thank you. Um, so we're gonna have time for two questions. Let's start from the top-voted one. How do you balance, Joanna, conversion copywriting with SEO copywriting? I focus on conversions, but the SEO team member wants to take copy to have an SEO as the primary goal. Can someone else up-vote quickly so I don't have to answer that one? Like, down-vote that. Um, about anything else? Okay, so that's like the hardest question for me. I don't prioritize SEO. And I know that the gentleman from Distilled will be talking about this on Friday. So I think I'm gonna be like, that's gonna be really amazing. Um, back at the back, right? For me, I think if you have to choose one, which we traditionally have had to choose because you can't have both, you put it. It doesn't mean that's true anymore. And again, I'm gonna learn more about that. For us, there's lots of ways to get traffic to your site. There's lots of ways to get traffic to your sales pages and things like that. Once they're there, there's not many more ways to convert them than with your words. So I would prioritize conversion over SEO every day. Okay, good answer.
So then, what are the best resources out there to improve a copywriter's writing abilities? Any best practices you can share? That was my talk. No, I'm just kidding. Um, so Momoko does a really great moment called. Price does a fantastic talk for CXL Institute. So check that out if you're not already a member. We have our own Copyhackers is filled with tutorials that are free and blog posts that are free. And of course, we have Copy School as well for those. But the best practices are really the number one thing to think about is just using frameworks and formulas and getting out of the way. Nobody cares about your writing skills. Your writing skills are the least important thing. Me having an English major background is the worst part of my history. Like, it's not helping at all. Just listen and then use those frameworks at your disposal. All right, thank you so much. Feel free to DM her with your questions later.