Product messaging — CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree Review — Part 11

This is part 11 out of 12 reviewing the digital psychology and persuasion minidegree at CXL Institute. For 12 weeks, I will deep-dive into areas such as psychology foundations, neuromarketing, persuasion models and behavioral psychology. Each week I will post one article reviewing the course content and discuss my learnings as well as my personal thoughts on it.

This week I have learned how to improve message strategy through customer research and analysis. The instructor for this week’s lessons was Momoko Price how is a conversion-focused copywriter. I’ve learned so many new things this week and can’t wait to put them into practice in the future.

How to conduct a conversion-focused copy teardown

According to Price tear-downs should be:

• Based on proven persuasion principles
• Used as a gap analysis tool, not a re-writing guide
• They can’t tell you what will work — only what likely isn’t

Momoko Prices copy teardown model is based on three different approaches to persuasion.

MecLab’s Conversion Heuristic Formula

In this formula, the probability of conversion is affected by the factors motivation, clarity of value proposition, incentive, friction and anxiety.

In order to increase the likelihood of a conversion to happen, we need to understand the user’s motivation and match our messaging with that motivation. The value proposition is also important and the purpose of it is to give the customer a promise of value if they buy your product. Next in the formula is the incentive and the friction. The incentives are things we can do to make people take action whereas friction is things that stop people from taking action. Finally, anxiety is about perceived risk.

Cialdini’s principles of persuasion

I’ve written about Cialdini’s principles of persuasion in an earlier post which you can read here. But just to mention the principles briefly here they are all persuasive principles that science has proven to be effective in conversion optimization. The principles are social proof, authority, liking, scarcity/urgency, reciprocity, commitment/consistency and unity.

Claude Hopkins’s scientific advertising

Claude Hopkins was the first conversion copywriter ever. This was completely new to me and I especially found rule number one interesting.

Hopkins’s rule #1: Be specific

People are more likely to forget a generic copy, using specific copy makes you stand out more. Being specific also makes you more trustworthy because it is harder to lie about specifics than generic stuff and people don’t expect you to do that.

Hopkins’s rule #2: Offer Service

The second rule is to offer service. Hopkin stated that the best ads are based on service rather than asking someone to buy. People are selfish and are focusing on what’s in it for them.

Hopkins’s rule #3: Tell the full story

By telling the full story people will understand what they can expect when engaging with you. An advertising story has to be reasonably complete whether if it’s long or short.

Hopkins’s Rule #4: Be a Sales(wo)man

This rule is about always thinking like a salesperson when writing copy. The copy you are writing should always focus on closing the deal.

Message-mining

Momoko Price defines message-mining as:

The process of sourcing the internet (or other sources, if available) for instances of your target customer voicing what they care most about when it comes to your product/solution.

Instead of writing your message, message-mining is about ”stealing” it. The customers are usually better at explaining what the value of your products is than you are because they are the ones who are using your product and paid money to do so. Also, they already speak a common language with your target market.

Message-mining is good for:

Identifying key messages

”Swiping” memorable copy

Checklist of messages to look for when message-mining:

• Desired outcomes
• Pain points/problems
• Purchase prompts
• Unique benefits and advantages
• Delightful product features
• Dealbreaker needs/requirements
• Uncertainties
• Objections
• Perceived risks

When looking for memorable copy online we should look for:

• Exactly how real people describe our product
• The multiple benefits and points-of-value they talk about
• Anything they absolutely rave about
• Specific things they don’t like about products similar to ours
• Suspicions they have/ways they’ve been burned before
• The exact real-life problems our product helps them minimize or solve
• Interesting analogies and similes they use

List above from this article by Joanna Wiebe.

The ”swipes” are then used for:

• Relevant, value-focused headlines
• Authentic lead paragraphs and hooks
• Market-specific terminology/slang
• Emotionally-engaging purchase prompts
• Laser-accurate objections

Momoko Price uses a strategic five-step process to do message-mining

Message hierarchies

Once you have collected copy through message mining in a spreadsheet it is time to put it into a story-based framework that can be applied to online sales pages. Storytelling is critical to selling because that is how humans think. Our thoughts tend to arrange themselves in a story.

When applying a story framework to a sales page the first thing you need to think about is the audience’s product awareness. The messaging flow will be different depending on if the product awareness is high or low.

Low awareness products are products that are new to the market or that aren’t that well known. The audience for these kinds of products is usually problem-aware compared to the audience for high awareness products that is solution/product aware. The gap is longer between the experienced problem and the solution for low awareness products and this has to be taken into consideration when using storytelling. Low awareness products therefore require longer form copy and more comprehensive persuasive arguments. The audience for high awareness products already knows about the product and what solution it can bring them and they are more motivated from the start.

Price provides a three-step framework for collecting the copy that you want to add to your sales page:

Identify your visitor’s awareness (via survey/poll responses)

Pinpoint your UVP (ideally using voice-of-customer research)

Mine your surveys, transcripts, polls, user tests for top Motivation/Value/Anxiety messages

90% of the copy you need is already in the spreadsheet that you created from messaging research.

Summary of the eleventh week

As always after a week at CXL Institute, I have some new tools to add to my toolbox. Most things this week were completely new to me and I really liked the storytelling part.

Next week I will continue on the same topic and review the lessons ”writing the first draft”, ”editing and punching up your copy” and ”conversion-focused formatting layout”. I am also going to write my final thoughts on this CXL minidegree program since it is my last week.