The conversion copywriting process

- Conversion copywriting is a science-based process of using words to get prospects and visitors to say yes. The question always is this. Which words? Too often, we jump to what we think is the answer to that question. We write a quick headline, that, in our heads, nails what we think we need to say on the page in question. We dash off an email that covers what we want to communicate to our subscribers or to a cold contact. Then we dust off our hands and tell ourselves the copy's done, but it's not. Not even close. As I'm going to show you, in identifying what to say to get that yes, we don't start by jotting down our own ideas. We don't start by asking our CEO what they want to say. We start with research and discovery, with drumming up the data we need in order to understand what should be written and how to write it. Data is at the heart of conversion copywriting. Research and discovery is stage one of the process. In this stage, you identify what the market and specific segments in that market need to hear from you in order to do really basic things like pay even a tiny bit of attention to you and to do bigger things, like actually buy from you. Following research and discovery, and the synthesis that completes that stage, is the second stage in the conversion copywriting process: writing, wireframing, and editing. This stage is informed by everything you learn in the research and discovery phase. It includes wireframing, which is laying out your page, because copy leads design. That's not because copy has got some sort of higher status, but because an email, ad, or page doesn't exist to showcase design. It exists to get a yes from the person interacting with it. And that's copy's job. Start with what you need to say and how you need to say it. Wireframe that, then work with design to bring it to life for your prospect. Not for the brand manager, not for the creative director. For your prospect, the person you need to say yes, so that your business keeps growing and you can keep paying the salaries of that brand lead and creative director. That brings us to the third stage: validation and experimentation. Because conversion copywriting is data-driven with heavy emphasis on voice of customer data, or the words your customers use, you may find yourself generating new ways of saying things, and new messages overall, that may feel uncomfortable for you, for your marketing team, for your branding team. Because you'll generate uncomfortably different copy in this process, we include validation. Basically with validation, you put your risky messages in front of a small audience and gauge their reaction before exposing those messages to more of your audience. The more different from the norm that your message sounds, the more likely it is to get a reaction, and validation helps us ensure that reaction will be a good one. With validation is experimentation. Once you complete an experiment, you then return to the first stage, because optimization is never done. And there's always another, more powerful message inside the next batch of research you do.