Product Messaging

One of a website or Saas’ primary responsibilities is to own how their product is perceived. Product messaging is important. They are key messages that are the main points of information you want your audience to hear, understand, and remember. Unless you actively define what your product stands for, customers will assign their own meaning to it or worse, they will allow your competition to shape their perception. It is week five (5) at the CXL Institute and I am very happy and proud of myself to have made it this far. How time flies right? I have seven (7) more weeks go to!

Copy Teardown

A better way to use tear downs to try to make sure that you’re always basing them on proven persuasion principles. You’re not just basing it on what you like or don’t like. It’s always a really great idea also to remember that a teardown will never tell you what your page needs to say. It will not tell you that this message is going to convert better than this other message. The only way that you can get that information is if you talk to your customers and your prospects. The people who are visiting your sales page. So it’s better to use them as a gap analysis tool. The first thing that we need to know is what is the real problem with conventional page teardowns? The biggest problem is that page tear downs or these heuristic analogies, they can be hugely opinion-based, and when that happens people contend to just revel in channelling their bad guys and just ripping a page to shreds based on their preference. Even domain experts are not left out as they can really dive into this and get all caught up and then give you a bunch of advice that A, isn’t that actionable, and B, can kind of change radially from expert to expert like you ask one person one thing and they say to do this, and you ask somebody else something else and they say to do the opposite. As said earlier, the only way that you can get that information is if you talk to your customers and your prospects. The people who are visiting your sales page.

There are critical components of persuasive argument or a convention sequence that any page needs to have, any funnel needs to have, to help someone actually decide yes, I would like to buy this product or I would like to submit my email. And you know, they’re fairly fundamental and they’re fairly universal. So a big thing you can do with a teardown just goes over your copy and say, am I actually including those elements, right? And am I eliminating the things that we know, based on persuasion science, tends to obscure the message, right? And tends to work against your conversion attempts.

Momoko Price gave us a bit of insight on her own way of Copy tear down. She says she basis them off three persuasion principles:

• MarketingExperiments’ Conversion Sequence Heuristic
• Richard Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion
• Claude Hopkins and his book Scientific Advertising

MECLab’s Conversion Heuristic Formula

C = 4M + 3V+ 2(I - F) - 2A

C = Probability of Conversion

M = Motivation (when)

V = Clarity of Value Prop (why)

I = Incentve

F = Fricton

A = Anxiety

Note that this is not a mathematical equation. This is using mathematical-like symbols to be able to convey what the powerof each element in this sort of mix of key components trying to make a persuasive argument. The thing is, people are searching and looking around and going from site to site to site all the time, and they usually have a reason in mind. They have something, they have an expectation that they are thinking about. You can’t control that, but that fundamentally is the driving force of why they’re going from site to site, including your sales page. You need to understand what your prospect’s motivation is, and make sure that your messaging is aligned with that motivation. You cannot control it, but it is by far the most important thing that's going to influence whether or not they find your offer compelling. This same principle goes for every other element in the equation. The numbers beside them are to show how much importance should be given to them and the elements that you should try to avoid or totally eliminate are the elements with the minus (-) symbol namely; Friction and Anxiety.

Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence

Social proof: Evidence that other people are saying yes and buying what you are selling.

Authority: A support from a huge platform people generally trusts validating your product/service.

Likability: Basically, it is easier for people to say yes to you when they like you.

Scarcity and Urgency: which is a huge element in terms of incentivizing people to act. If they know that there’s a limited amount of resources, they are going to be more motivated to try to grab those resources.

Reciprocity: You are more likely to get your customers to give you things if you give them things first. It is advised to make your customer feel like you are doing more for them than they are doing for you.

Commitment and Consistency: Getting someone to do a small act that attracts a nice reward will increase the chances of them doing a bigger task later on.

Unity: Making people feel like they are part of you and your community when they make purchases from you.

Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising

Be specific: People tend to assume that if you are giving them specific data points, specific attributes, very specific claims in your offer, that you’re not making them up, because if you were really making them you would be going ahead and being intentionally unethical. Specificity builds trust.

Offer Service: Humans are naturally selfish and this is key to always remember. If you can craft your messaging around offering service like I am here out of the goodness of my heart to give you this amazing offer that's going to make your life so much better, and you craft your messaging around that core principle, you’re going to have a better time trying to convince people to buy from you.

Tell the full story: You can tell an entire, complete offer, like the story around an offer, in a small display ad. You just have to make sure that you highlight the right components in the right order.

Be a Sales(wo)man: Think about it, will the copy you are about to write help you sell to someone if you were to say it to them? It is best to think about copies like your customers are in front of you and you are trying to verbally convince them.

Another framework is the funnel section framework.

Attention-Capturing Copy — SERP Snippet, PPC Ads, Display Ads, FB Ads

Persuasive Copy — Home Page, PPC Landing Pages, Product Details Pages

Transactional Copy — Cart Page, Order Summary, Checkout Page Signup Page

Confirmation Copy — (Payment Success Message, First-Time UX Copy

These are just a part of Product messaging as it contains alot more topics and gives deeper insights. If you would like to learn more about this, click here to join!