Copywriting

Remember the door-to-door salesmen who used to call on your house when you were a kid? I often wondered how hard those guys had to work just to make a few sales. They had the advantage of ‘being there’ with the customer so their sales pitches could not easily be ignored. But many, if not most of these face-to-face prospects would listen politely, but never buy anything.

On the web, we don’t come to the buyer, he or she comes to us. We call out to those who may be interested in what we are selling. We have at our disposal a  neon sign to call those readers who may have an interest in what we sell, it’s called a headline. The headline is the most important piece of a sales letter. The headline functions as an announcement to all ‘passers by’ just what the offer to sell is about, and most important, why the reader should stop and read more.

A headline calls to those, and only those who are interested in what we have to say- and those are the only people that interest us. Think about how you read the newspaper. You scan the headlines and stop to read more when the headline offers something that is compelling to you. You may not be interested in a story about gardening - but understand that there is some reader out there who can’t wait to find that story about trees and shrubs that you simply passed by.

Web surfers read at a more frantic pace than even newspaper readers. Your job as a marketer is complicated because visitors to web sites are used to ads, sales pitches and offers. Our job is to get them to pause and read. The most carefully-crafted ad copy is useless unless the reader stops to read. Spend as much time on your headline as on your sales copy.  Make your headline clear, but compelling - offer the reader a benefit to consider your offer. Don’t try to hide your intent - the reader knows you are selling something, make them glad they stopped to read.

One of the most often overlooked aspects of long-term copywriting success is testing. Top copywriters and marketers are always be testing their successful ad copy against variations. Will shorter or longer sentences work better in a sales letter? Should the headline be changed? The only way to ever know the truth is to test. It is ultimately the buyer who decides which is best.

Don’t allow yourself to come to any conclusions about your ad copy unless it is supported by testing evidence. If you don’t have a method to test new copywriting variations and measure the results, you wont maximize your copy’s potential. The sole reason for your ad copy is to make a sale. It is not designed to enhance your image or to win any creativity contests. Your ad copy only exists to make sales. 

Don’t rely on gut instinct or the opinions of other to evaluate your ad copy. You buyers will ultimately tell which is your most effective ad copy. It doesn’t matter if you use multivariate testing or split testing, just test! Once your buyers have told you which copy is the best, make this your control copy. Now try to beat that control with something new. Often, your proven ad copy will prevail over the new copy.

Don’t let that deter you. You have to test to uncover all of your customer’s likes and dislikes. Stop guessing in your marketing efforts and start continuously testing your ad copy. Listen to your buyers in a measured and scientific way. Only trust your buyers to tell you the truth. This is the only way your will know.

Try AdTest Pro - it’s an inexpensive and very effective way to start testing.

Yes - for most sites.

Contrary to what most gurus are saying today, for sites with under 1000 unique visitors per week, simple split testing will work better for you. Why? The first is simple math. Tom Lindmeier explains it better than I could - but the bottom line, without big, stable traffic numbers and a steady, measured conversion rate, your multivariate testing results are not much better than choosing a ‘winner’ sales page at random.

Any freshman statistics student learns that for a statistical observation to be reliable, it needs to be derived from a sample size large enough to ensure reliability. If you are launching a new product or site with zero traffic to start - you are making a mistake if you are making copy writing decisions based on statistics based on just a few hundred visitors and a handful of sales. Keep in mind also, the more variables you test, the more observations you will need for a valid test. The second reason I don’t like this approach is that the software used in multivariate testing puts your sales letter into ‘cookie cutter’ mode. You have to break your approach down into predictable chunks: “ok, here is the guarantee, here is the call to action”…etc. This flies in the face of good copy writing development technique. When you are launching a new product - you need to test more than just variations on the same basic sales letter. You need a few different sales letters, that have variations in headline, appeal, target audience and content order/format. You can’t be bound to what your ’software’ says you can do with your variations and ideas.

My advice: split test 3 or 4 sales letters first - in 30 sales or so, you’ll know what overall approach is working best - then you can work out the minutiae of what color, guarantee copy, etc. converts best. John Taylor has an excellent script that is inexpensive and works well. It is better than Google’s free solution and some of the older tracking scripts like the Scientific Marketing Assistant because it keeps all of your traffic on your domain’s index page- a very important SEO advantage. Check out the sales page for my enhanced version of AdTest Pro. My enhanced version allows you to add pages to test AFTER the test has begun, and allows you to edit pages after they go live. John has kindly allowed me to resell my version of the script. Check out the sales page, or just click the button below to buy:

AdTest Pro - $9.95
Secure Payments
Made Through PayPal