9 Ways to Write Higher Converting Copy (Without Sounding Sleazy) – Lianna Patch – MicroConf 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] I'm so excited to be at microcon leave my terrible family behind I suspect you guys feel the same like enjoy suckas I'll go on a micro gun I also think it's probably the only room in the world where you can stand at the back and not be able to pick out Mike Taber Mike is leaving the talk right now he's very upset anyway I'm going to show you in just about 30 minutes 9 ways to write higher converting copy without coming off like a salesy douchebag which is not what any of us want I'm going to show you the four things that high-converting copy must do for emails

0:55very specific emails that you can swipe and plug into your existing customer lifecycle or journey or funnel or whatever you want to call it whatever we're calling it these days and I'm gonna show you four common copy mistakes and how you can avoid them and like 25 people in my round table just now we're asking you these exact questions and I was like you're probably like what that's not 9 I'm like I'm a writer not a math person please don't be mad let's start with 4 musts of high converting copy and this is like the next thing I'm about to tell you is really the only

1:33thing you need to do to write copy although I do have a talk after you know I will keep talking but if you only take this away then I will be happy I want you to pull your copy directly from your customer research so I noticed a starter edition maybe we don't have tons and tons of reviews and qualitative feedback to mine so you have to get a little creative you have to reach out to your people and ask them questions reverse engineer from what you need to know to the question that you need to ask you could go in your support chat transcripts if you have those ask your support people

2:09and you probably are the support person just start keeping track of the things that people say over and over and the questions that they ask you over and over because that should be in your copy oh and if you send surveys like please don't make people sit through a 15-minute you know fifty questions survey because you won't get responses and toward the end they'll start saying very mean things to you hasn't happened to me so what are you looking for when you're going through all of this qualitative feedback you're gonna start to see certain messages emerge right you're gonna start to see people saying the same things or feeling the same way

2:46and you're gonna use that to build out a hierarchy of what your copy should present to them so message 1 oh I heard it from 12 people probably needs to be close to the top of the page if 12 is the biggest number here then message 2 heard it from 5 people it's probably gonna be somewhere in the middle of the page that's where I'm gonna address that problem or that claim message 3 so on so forth these are the patterns and the Preferences that are gonna start to come out and you're looking for sticky phrases the ways that people talk about your product that you probably would not

3:18have thought to do it I was working with a mattress company recently and somebody wrote I literally want to be buried on top of this mattress and I was like I will use that so here's an example from a digital program that helps people start online businesses did this messaging work with them they say now that's what I call a good dose of hard-ass reality I wouldn't have put it that way but he did and I used it someone else described herself as a hummingbird flitting from you know silver bullet to silver bullet mixing metaphors a little bit here and someone else said the vein of gold was always

3:54there if only I had kept on digging so super concrete images that you don't even have to come up with your people will just serve up to you so keep an eye out for those and the more you go through this data the more you'll start to see those things and be able to point them out oh and when you're doing this kind of research make sure that you always take the entire chunk don't just take the phrase because it's more helpful to have any context we like context right we're engineers it's an unpopular thing to say right now I'm gonna have some slides throughout that will be yellow take a picture of

4:29these oh I'll wait take a picture of me with the slides no these are gonna be helpful things for you to take home and remember and try these are some of my favorite questions to ask your people so what was going on in your life that led you to consider me or my solution people will be like oh my god my dog died and then my mom got sick and I just needed an app to make my coffee to feel like I had control over my life again and you're like cool it's more than I needed thank you and you use that and your copy how will this product make your life

5:04better how will my sass or my service or whatever it is improve your life let them tell you how they want you to help them again you'll get so much great feedback from this question what would make this product irresistible to you they'll say oh I want all of these features disregard the ones that you know don't fit with your roadmap or that you're probably not gonna build it too expensive or the only one person wants but again helpful to know what people want from you and whoo I'm so excited who do you think this product is perfect for because even if it's not them this

5:36forces them to picture a person and describe that person to you so you might think that you've built the perfect product for soccer moms you ask soccer moms they're all like no this is perfect for teenage boys which like wow how did you make that mistake that's terrible it's a pretty big disconnect tough crowd thank you thank you loan clapper please see me after the second thing the high converting copy must do and it was very hard for me not to make this its own talk because I already did because I did that talk last year growth lighten up a little bit have a little bit of fun with

6:15your copy when you use humor you reduce anxiety you build more trust with your people you build camaraderie and it helps you set yourself apart especially if you have competitors so we just talked about this in the roundtables if you have if you're in a competitive space which I feel like we all are now if you were to take your website take your logo off put it next to your competitors how would you be able to tell that it's you you know are you all saying the same thing this is where you have a chance to give your brand a voice and you can address objections which you

6:45already know about because you did some research so here's an example uh Amy Howie was here I think for growth right no she wasn't well I miss her she sends this great email onboarding to her SAS which is like a card-based organizational system hey there it's me Amy again I'm back with some more sweet sweet Khurana knowledge I think that's a joke on carnal knowledge I took it that way I thought it was great hashtag sorry not sorry if you already have made a few cards stick around you'll probably learn something super conversational not the kind of onboarding email you expect right but the one that works here is 500

7:28startups they send this daily email with startup tips notice their cadence they say same ten-second format same daily cadence same love affair with animated gifs latest must read knowledge they're really giving their brand a voice right if I open this email I know it's them so don't be afraid to do this don't be afraid to use gifs we'll talk about that a little bit later the third thing that your high converting copy must do is get emotional provoke some kind of response I'm dealing but fear has its place too and the easiest way to do that is spite telling a story starring your reader so again help them envision your product in

8:07their life you've already asked them that question now put it in context for them and another way to get emotional is by just going through your copy and taking out your like underperforming words and replacing them so here is a great example of soapbox it's a video software they say you did it you made your first or your referral made their first soapbox video it's all because of you and I was like dang I feel really good right now I always feel really good that's a lie I'm a stress ball so they're like hooray and they evoke this positive emotion from either celebrating me they also send another

8:42another email with a Jif of their entire team celebrating when you make a video it's great what does fear look like evoking fear in a non sleazy way this is transferwise maybe who uses transferwise nobody cool I like it helps send and receive money thank you right here I don't know hi uh thanks for being here they say you you do business in multiple currencies so you get it banks charge hidden fees and for small businesses those fees add up they're not like the world is ending you're gonna die if you use a bank like it's gonna be terrible they're like hey this probably sucks and

9:25you might not be aware of how much money you're losing check out our service instead not sleazy but a super effective way to evoke fear when it comes to using harder-hitting words again take a photo these are some of the most common like adjectives and verb phrases that we see and copy that maybe aren't working as hard as they could I think I just like using the word phenomenal and grab I'm always grabbing things talk to me later I'll grab you it's not a code of conduct violations so one last note on being emotional don't fake it I had this slide last year I think it's

10:12gonna be one of those slides that repeats throughout all my talks because I love it so much like look at his dead little eyes he's not feeling it people will know when you're being disingenuous and not you don't have to be like super crazy out-of-the-box excited if you don't feel that way just you know get a little bit of excitement in there when you're writing the fourth way to write higher converting copy is to do it throughout your entire copy ecosystem so often I think especially as bootstrappers if we have a collection of tools those tools probably have pre-built templates that have copy in them right and we're like I have a

10:52confirmation email I have a transaction email I have an upgrade email I don't need to update the copy in that but if you have if you spent the time to work on your copy on the front end and then somebody you know signs up and loves you and gets this transactional email that just is like a wet fart you know you're you're disappointing them you're not gonna keep them around longer because you've shown them you weren't paying attention to the details these are some of the places that I like to include copy that just shows I paid attention right I was looking click trigger copy so that's underneath a call to action

11:26usually a button it's a great place to address objections if someone's maybe not ready send them somewhere else on your site or in your email or whatever it is trial policies people expect those to be legalese if you can go in and without irritating your lawyer maybe add like a parenthetical aside that's like this is boring but you should read it people will appreciate that 404 pages Easter eggs somebody came to me once and he was like you know I'm on your newsletter whatever to check out my site and I looked at his site and he is a French fashion designer not who you would expect to be using like funny

12:04weird detail-oriented copy in English no less I scrolled all the way down to the bottom and it said whatever you do don't click here and I clicked it and it opened a modal and it's you rebel you we like you take 15% off and I was like I love this and I wrote back to him and I was like let's get married he was like I'm gay so that was good speaking of click trigger copy speaking of bluetick somebody mentioned this earlier I worked on the site with Mike these are two of our start your free trial calls to action just in case somebody's not ready to click that big

12:41green button even though it is so specific right it just tells them exactly what's gonna happen they can say see what else blue tick can do or they can say or or if they're not ready we say give it a try for two weeks you'll like it if you don't like it hey it was free like really you have nothing to lose so maybe just do it my favorite kind of thing to write four of four pages are a great place to reward people because instead of just ending up lost in the wilderness you have an opportunity to build the relationship with your brand it doesn't take a second let's see can I

13:14make this do a thing again I was like astonished at this page I think is that John Travolta in Pulp Fiction yeah cool right like awesome oh thank you pages are another great place to pay attention to the details this is probably the one ecommerce example I left in here because I just loved it so much I placed an order with Harry's they're like here's some information you need to know when your stuff will get delivered what you can do if you have questions and email us your favorite Gordon Lightfoot song that's how I knew I wasn't their target audience cuz I was like who is Gordon

13:50Lightfoot so I googled it that's him that's Gordon Lightfoot do we want to take a quick poll raise your hands if you think Gordon Lightfoot is still alive is he in Game of Thrones no but I feel like he could be oh my god you're right he looks like that oh you're right okay so so not many people think he's still alive right he is he's doing fine Gordon is fine everyone just so you know he's doing good thank you thank you thank you we could stop here no we won't I can't physically can't stop here's an example of one of those transactional emails confirmation email whatever

14:38platform you're using guaranteed they have some default copy built in but mail charts took the extra step of customizing this a little bit they say thanks for joining mail charts it's great to have you real quick can you please verify your email address and then the call to action finishes the sentence in my head or finishes that sentence yep this is my email super low friction super easy just for me to click it go for it get emails from them quick review do this stuff do it good y'all having fun cool me too we get to drink after this so excited I don't have a problem let's move on to

15:24for lifetime value growing emails that no one is sending which blows my mind and like no one is an exaggeration right I'm a copywriter it's hyperbole but not enough people are sending these emails in particular the first one is the personal on border email so you want to send this after someone has signed up for your sass but before they've had that aha moment write that activation where they really understand the value and they're gonna keep using it and you want to send us as a plain text email I'll be had a great example of this that he sends earlier it's like two sentences right send it as you and ask for replies

16:01here's another example if you didn't like the obvi one they're like hey Leanna here's the thing you don't really have to read this all this is probably a little long and what I wish this email had done instead of saying hit reply and let me know if you have any questions or problems because that makes me do more work again figure out what answers you need from your people reverse engineer question from that and then put that question in this email so they will give you that qualitative feedback it's a nice way to passively collect that data and then you can get more buy-in from them because if they're having a

16:34conversation with the founder it's gonna be kind of hard to just be like actually never mind I'm just gonna go you're like wait come back I love you I need to make this work which we do right second email preemptive segment her I would love love love to see more software's doing this so you're gonna send this again kind of near the beginning as they're starting to use your product it's gonna reinforce that feeling of buy-in and it's gonna help you tailor your following emails to their role so if you serve multiple job roles with your product which you probably do or multiple demographics or segments that might need to hear

17:12different messages from you get that information from them early and make sure you're sending them the right stuff you probably aren't going to build that right away you're probably just gonna build your one oh and then work from there am i standing to knee or something this is a message by the way if you get bored you can just drop acid and look at the ceiling uh okay so what does a preemptive segment or look like this is my email from my onboarding sequence and I just want to know if you're someone who might hire me or you're someone who is coming from behind to steal my job

17:48and ruin my life copywriters bastards just kidding I live in an abundance mindset so this adds a tag right and then I can send them more helpful stuff what I actually do is I don't send the copywriters any sales emails so that they don't know how I work they always click both links it's really annoying ah the third email that I would love to see more of is the real person case study you can send this whenever you want honestly you can send this after they've activated but I think it's gonna have the most impact during onboarding and you can send multiple ones by the way but I would have at least one real

18:28person case study maybe after you segment them say oh hey you're a teacher great here's what a teacher who got a ton of value from my product than her story and you're gonna help her set the context or help this reader set the context from I was having a horrible time I needed help I found this solution now I'm using it life is sunshine and rainbows you don't even have to write this as a case study because like writing right it's gross you can take screenshots if you have a Facebook group or a slack group this is Brian Harris who runs video fruit he also runs this

19:03thing called agent which helps people find speaking gigs and he took tons of screenshots in slack and sent them in an email being like look at all these people who got value are you getting value go ahead and get in there makes us feel like we're not alone so helpful hey people in the hallway what's up red anyway the fourth email is gonna be the exclusive upgrade invite so this is one that you'll send after they've activated after they've become a regular user but you still want to keep them around you still want to keep them feeling special and you can make them feel like they're

19:43elite and spark excitement feel like VIPs here's loom doing that for me you know loom pro is here you can try it out first oh me why why me okay you'll notice that I was using soapbox and then I switched to loom don't ask me why Chris Savage was here I'm glad it's not here anymore anyway it made me feel special right that like that okay I love that Jeff to quickly recap give you a second to appreciate I asked my designer to make that slide she's like that's really stupid and I was like no it's not do it I know when I have a good idea these are the emails you

20:25should consider sending if you're not sending something like them already people are taking pictures even though it's a blue slide let me hit you with that yellow slide this is an example of an onboarding flow that you can use notice how emails four to whatever are actually based on choose-your-own-adventure you know best what steps people need to take inside your product to get value and you're gonna want to send an email for each of those steps until they get it done and then you can say like hey you're doing great here's an invite offer upgrade sing candy I don't know get in my van whatever you want to tell them kid in my

21:08SAS van it's so dark let's move on to conversion killing copy mistakes and how to avoid them this was one of the questions people kept asking me during the roundtable and I was like could you just wait just wait thirty minutes and they were like this isn't very helpful and I was like don't tell Robin but I'm yelling at you one of the biggest mistakes I see all the time especially from people who have to write their own product copy is me centric copy because it's not about you it's about your reader most of the time you should probably be writing in second person that's you voice here is an

21:46example that I blurred out he says hi Liana I'm blank founder of a little Toronto company on a mission to give freelancers back some of their own time we call ourselves blank being a freelancer myself I've always found it hard to manage feedback and copy changes on websites so we solved that problem here is a demo video Liana would you use this and I was like how many times can you talk about yourself dog this is a cold email never heard from this person before I hope he's not here awkward just like well it's really not about me it's about you I didn't click that incredibly

22:23Pelin call-to-action shockingly did not click that so how do you fix that if you tend to write this way it's okay you can write your draft that way how do you fix it just go through and flip so if you if you tend to write like our product lets you get your contract signed faster flip it into you voice get your contract signed faster it's also shorter easier to understand promises a result it's better copy that's what I'm talking about in case you forgot we're doing great it's the end of the day second mistake I think we all struggle with sometimes is writing like a robot it can be really

23:04hard because we went to school for writing right we learned a paragraph has five sentences has an intro you know three body sentences and a conclusion but that's not the way that we write anymore that's not the way that we communicate so why do we still write our marketing copy like that another bad example because we're having fun shooting on people right like this is fun okay just me cool ally was here earlier she graciously sent me this example hi Ally take a peek into our musings momentum and March updates and then taking take a look inside software name I can't imagine going up to a person like

23:40tonight at the cocktail party and being like hello would you like to take a peek into my March updates they're probably like I think that's against the code of conduct it's just it's not how people talk right that's how it made me feel so what happens if you tend to write a little bit stilted we just talked about this in some of the roundtables what can you do to get around that without agonizing over it don't write talk you can sit there with your iphone recorder on or whatever other recorder you have I think some people use Androids I've never met any and just talk about your product the way

24:20that you talk to a person better yet if you're doing that customer research and you have a zoom call scheduled with a prospect or a current trial user or an existing customer record the zoom call upload it to a transcription site I like rev.com they turn things around really fast it's very accurate and you'll start to hear both the way that you talk about your copy like a human person and the way that they talk about it so it's a win-win it's gonna give you a lot of useful stuff that you can go through highlight put in your document put in your copy it wrote itself hooray

24:54I'm so excited I'm the only one Mike is having a great time I'm sorry Mike the third mistake I see is sentences that are trying to do too much I used to have a photo of a donkey whose cart was overloaded and it was in the air have y'all seen that I think is like a famous photo yeah so if you're giving your sentence too many jobs to do your message will get lost your readers will get lost they will leave you behind and they will never come back I feel like I have to get my mouth wet before I try to read this this is a you know the mission

25:26statement of some bio company a biotech company to ask important health questions irrespective of any economic drivers and to develop effective protocols and improve metabolism for those that wish to make themselves impervious to metabolic diseases such as cancer diabetes cardiovascular Alzheimer's disease mmm shut up it's so bad don't do it every time I get up here I do a German accent and it's worse every year I think the one German went home thank God sorry Oliver I'm just apologizing anyway how can you fix this mistake give all of your sentences one job make one point with each sentence you'll make your sentences a little bit shorter sometimes

26:12you're like oh maybe that's too short you can mix it up if you want write a little bit of a longer sentence here and there but in general each sentence should be making one point that's how you're gonna write more clearly and if you have a sentence that's not getting someone to the next sentence you can probably cut it make sense make sentence cool words are hard math is hard - what am I good at why am I here anyway here's a great example of giving each sentence one job they say hi Liana today we bring you the highly requested templates library it's a resource that hosts

26:49pre-designed customer journey templates to help you hit the and running weather you need to generate leads on board new customers are sent an email newsletter we have a template for you we made you a thing it's full of templates there's one that will work for you they don't all have to be like super short truncated you can again talk like a human but they could have made this one whole sentence you know we bring you a templates lively library that is full of pre-designed customer journey templates to generate leads on board new customers or send an email no too much runaway the last copy mistake that someone asked me about and

27:26I was like you are literally talking about my talk just hold on we'll get there cliches and phrases that upon closer examination don't actually mean anything what do these look like welcome Liana we're excited to share our unparalleled experiences and exclusive offers what

27:54that was an unparalleled experience receiving that email here's a sneakier version or a sneakier example so this is from a very well known mock-ups app they say hey you did a thing you joined us and the call-to-action is jump in and get started something we say all the time right jump in get started I'm gonna loop back around I'm gonna circle back around all those email cliches that if you think about it don't really mean anything I don't know what's gonna happen when I jump in and get started I don't know what page this is gonna take me to so it's not compelling I'm just like what also a slide that I include

28:32every time he's great right he's great we're having fun I'm the only one having fun what is a good compelling specific call-to-action look like here are some I know exactly what's gonna happen when I click on all three of those links and again as we know calls to action can be links they can be buttons they can be standing on stage screaming into the void having a great time thank you it's hurry okay so yeah when in doubt be specific tell people exactly what's gonna happen and here are some copy cliches that might sneak their way into your work especially if you're looking for a tagline or unique value

29:17proposition you might kind of default to something like this you know send invoices like never before get pull requests done like never before you'll love how bla bla bla o adjectives yet adjectives is the the format that Hooters uses delightfully tacky yet unrefined again what does that mean those are synonyms anyway I have an issue with Hooters and let's please kill the three word tagline we think it sounds special it is not it is meaningless here's another recap of this section we just went through please stop making these mistakes I can help you I realize I'm coming off very antagonistic but I really if this is coming from a place of

30:04love I love you please say it back thank you hooray doubling down this is everything that I have just been through with you and I had a great time and that's it thank you so much hi there I'm sorry sorry with your segmenting your email segmenting I'm assuming let's say you have an email list that's pre-existing and you you want to introduce this new segmenting does that mean all your old subscribers go into a one bucket and then you have new buckets for your new segments you can do the same thing with your existing subscribers you can say hey I want to send you more relevant content in the

30:56future can you go ahead and take a second to click on this link awesome Yonex just email them and say hi they love it people want to hear from you I'm answering questions but I will create talk vana thank you so for software products that have a free trial obviously they sign up theirs whatever 14 days and your goal is to get them to convert to a paying customer what's your advice for freemium products to where you know they may sign up just to use it for free how do you balance trying to get them to upgrade verse not being like too pushy with that initial

31:39onboarding it's tough it's gonna be different for everyone if they're using your freemium product regularly they're probably more likely to see the value in upgrading if they just signed up once and then quit maybe not the person to hit with a marketing campaign I mean I would say email until they unsubscribe or convert you know you're gonna end up purging them anyway in terms of timing you can actually email much more often than you think to most people as long as you're giving value so a rule of thumb that you can use is every three emails you can send a sales email so send three emails with

32:26value like showing them how to use a feature or reminding them what they love about your product and then email number four is like hey we've seen you doing this why don't you get into the upgrade