Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client runs a large online marketplace for private tutoring in the United States. Students post what they need help with, and local tutors apply to teach them.

Research: A marketplace has two sides

Like any marketplace, our client’s business required both demand-side and supply-side thinking. Naturally, they wanted as many students as possible to search, choose, and pay for private tuition. That’s the demand side. But they also understood that no matter how good their demand-side CRO, they could never convert a student who could not find a tutor to teach them.

(In terms of the Theory of Constraints, you can’t add students faster than you can add tutor capacity.)

When we discussed supply-side optimization with our client, they pointed to their tutor registration form. This page was presented as a standard sign-up form to register with the marketplace. That made sense, but when we looked at the page’s traffic sources, we saw that many of the people landing there were coming directly from job-search sites.

In other words, the visitors weren’t expecting a general tutoring platform to join—they were looking for work.

How could we meet these potential tutors where they were in their search and make it clear that our client had real students waiting?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original tutor recruitment page. There were different pages for different locations (e.g. Tutoring Job in New York City) but the content was mostly just a registration form.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s a mockup of our variation. The most prominent addition was a genuine tutor request from a real live user of the platform.

In detail, our changes included:

• A headlined job title. The headline named the actual subject as well as the city.
• A real student request. We opened the page with the real posting from a real student—“I am looking for someone who has experience with Spanish and Algebra 1.”
• A brief job specification. Description, qualifications and pay, set out as scannable bullets under those three headings, including the hourly range most tutors charge.

You’ll notice that the page also switched from “register” language to “apply” language, as we promoted the potential benefits of being on the platform:

• Apply to become a tutor to help this student and other students in your community.
• Work with a variety of students in your best subjects.
• Spend more time teaching and less time administering.
• Set your own hours while you help students learn the subjects you love to teach.

Result: Tutor applications increased by 15%

During the test, we observed a 15% increase in tutor applications—or an increase of around 20,000 in the first year.

It’s worth remembering that while this win will not show up directly as revenue, every additional tutor makes the marketplace slightly better at serving the next student who will pay for help with Spanish, or Algebra, or the cello.

The fact that supply-side improvements are slower to reach the bottom line is precisely why they are sometimes neglected. Meanwhile, they are often the least optimized surface a business owns, which is another way of saying they are a great place to find significant wins.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

That’s not to say that these things aren’t important. They can be very important, but that doesn’t stop them draining a visitor’s attention or interest. The usual fix is to say the boring but important message louder, or in such a way that visitors are forced to interact.

But there is an alternative worth considering.

340 million spoonfuls of sugar

Instead of shouting louder, you make the message something people might actually want to consume and even share. Mary Poppins called this strategy “a spoonful of sugar,” and in this Copywriting Friday, we’re going to look at one of the most extreme examples of it that we’ve ever come across.

In November 2012, Metro Trains Melbourne and their agency McCann released a train‑safety film that more than 340 million people chose to watch. It became the most‑awarded campaign in the 60‑year history of the Cannes Lions, taking a record five Grand Prix. And it did that by refusing to be a safety message at all, until the final few seconds.

Here’s the video, but fair warning. This is a tune that can get stuck in your head.

The song opens with no trains in sight, just a cheerful little band finding inventive ways to end themselves:

Set fire to your hair.
Poke a stick at a grizzly bear.
Eat medicine that’s out of date.
Use your private parts as piranha bait.

Then the chorus, the part you will be humming an hour from now:

Dumb ways to die.
So many dumb ways to die.

If you watch it through once, there’s a high chance that you’ll be compromised. That is the whole trick, so let’s break it into pieces you can actually use.

Change the medium, not just how you say it

Most safety campaigns try to word the warning better. McCann started somewhere else. Their executive creative director, John Mescall, put the problem in a sentence:

The aim of this campaign is to engage an audience that really doesn’t want to hear any kind of safety message, and we think dumb ways to die will.

In other words, the goal was not a clearer warning. It was attention from people who wouldn’t normally give any.

So the team changed what the thing was, from a public-service announcement to a music video… and later a mobile game that hit number one in 22 countries.

Of course, not everyone has the budget or need to go this far. What matters more is the mindset. How can I make my message more engaging for my audience? (That’s the kind of question that inspired us to write about Better Call Saul or Any Given Sunday.)

What is your version of the safety warning, the disclaimer nobody reads, or the funnel page that people bounce from? And more importantly… what would make someone actually want to reach the end of it? The mindset isn’t just for “boring” pages; it can apply anywhere.

For example, the playful design and copy of PostHog’s website.

If you are in PostHog’s target market of app developers, you’ll likely be delighted by their website long before you get to buy anything.

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Lead with the delight

For almost the whole song, there is no train safety anywhere, only cute characters eating out-of-date medicine and offering themselves to piranhas. The real message arrives in the closing verse, and the song winks as it makes the switch:

Stand on the edge of a train station platform. Drive around the boom gates at a level crossing. Run across the tracks between the platforms. They may not rhyme, but they’re quite possibly the dumbest ways to die.

By the time you reach train tracks, you are already invested. You have laughed (or at least smiled) at the inanity of the video, and you have caught the chorus. When the “ask” finally comes, you are a receptive audience instead of a defensive one.

This is related to Joe Sugarman’s slippery slide. In the classic book, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, he argued that the only job of your headline is to get the reader to read the first line, whose only job is to get them to the second, and so on. Each element carries the reader on so smoothly that stopping feels like more effort than continuing.

Now look at your own funnel. Is there anywhere that you are serving the vegetables first? As important as they are, these places are potential leaks in your funnel. Is there anything you can do to earn your visitors’ patience before you spend it?

Give your audience some rhyme time

There is a reason that many people are still singing Dumb Ways to Die hours or days after they’ve seen it. In 2000, psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh showed experimental participants real rhyming aphorisms next to reworded versions. For example:

What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals.

Became:

What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks.

Would it surprise you to know that the participants rated the rhyming versions as more accurate descriptions of human behavior, even though the claims were identical? That’s because the rhyme is easier to process, and we quietly mistake that mental fluency for truth. This is the rhyme-as-reason effect.

Of course, you need not be a composer to use it. Marketers have mined this for decades, from Pringles’ “Once you pop, you can’t stop” to Folgers’ “The best part of wakin’ up is Folgers in your cup.”

Backed with the right research, rhymes can work almost anywhere, including product names, headlines, email subjects and more. Find an opportunity and A/B test it out.

As we have said repeatedly over the past twenty years… companies that test, grow to be best.

(You get the idea.)

Absurd specificity makes mental movies

“Be careful around trains” is forgettable because it is abstract; there is nothing to picture. “Use your private parts as piranha bait” is unforgettable because it is absurdly and painfully concrete.

You can see it, however much you would rather not. Every dumb death in the song is a tiny, vivid, particular image, not a general caution.

This is a rule we come back to constantly in this series. Concrete and specific beats the generic, every time. A specific detail plays a mental movie; an abstraction plays nothing.

Find the abstraction in your own copy. Where are you writing “trusted by many businesses” when you could write the one specific, verifiable, pictureable detail that a reader would struggle to forget?

The real lesson

The instinct with an unwelcome message is to keep polishing the warning until it finally lands. “Dumb Ways to Die” suggests the opposite.

Do not say the avoided thing better. Earn the right to say it at all by making something people genuinely want, and letting your real message ride in on its back.

The final safety lines in the song do not rhyme because they did not need to. By the time they land, the audience is already singing.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client delivers gifts internationally, serving visitors in several languages and currencies. Most of its orders are tied to a date that cannot slip, such as a birthday or an anniversary.

Research: The add-ons customers liked were the ones they rarely saw

Near the bottom of each product page sat a section called “Make it special.” It offered things a customer could add to a gift, among them balloons, chocolates and so on. The section sat below the product photograph, below the description and delivery policy, and below the Buy now button.

In customer feedback, we kept noticing the same thing. People who had added one of these items to their order were glad they had. Customers did not dislike the add-ons. Most of them simply never focused on them.

Situated as they were, the add-ons asked a second question while the first one, whether to purchase the main gift, was still open. When two things compete for attention, the less important one is easy not to notice at all.

One option could be to make the section bigger and more obvious, but the product page already had a job. Everything on it, the photograph, the description, the delivery policy, the price, was working to settle a single question. Is this the right gift?

So what would happen if we moved the second question to later in the process?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original product page. The add-ons sat at the very bottom, under the heading “Make it special,” below the product photograph, the description, the delivery policy, and the Buy now button.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we took the add-ons off the product page altogether and gave them an interstitial step of their own. The offers each appeared on the following page with a checkbox and a price, under a single line inviting the customer to add something extra.

Although this added an extra step, the customer did not have to do anything before continuing. It simply moved a question that had previously competed for attention to its own moment in the process.

Result: Order value increased by 28%

During the test, we observed a 28% increase in revenue per order.

You might think that adding an extra step to a funnel will inevitably decrease conversions, but the variation had no impact on overall conversions. By giving the add-ons their own space, we were able to increase their visibility without adding significant friction.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s website and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

AutoTune is the vocal-processing software that changed the sound of modern music. Made by Antares Audio Technologies, it remains the industry standard for pitch correction and vocal effects, used by producers and artists around the world.

A short video interview with the client

A transcript of the video

“The results in terms of business impact have been fantastic. I can point to several tests that have had a million-dollar-plus impact on an annual revenue basis.

“Partnering with CRE over the last two and a half years—and hundreds of tests on our site—has been a phenomenal relationship. We’ve really enjoyed not just the people that we’ve worked with, but also the outcomes that they’ve delivered.

“One test that we ran recently was a pricing test on one of our subscription products. The result was a 27% increase in revenue per visitor, a 24% increase in average order value, and a 32% increase in conversion rate on our annual subscription. We also saw an 18% increase in LTV measured over 12 months, and a 17% increase in LTV measured over 24 months.

“It’s a meaningful impact to the business to see double-digit potential percentage revenue gains on a recurring basis.

“My name is Spencer. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for Antares Audio Technologies, better known as AutoTune. We’re a music technology company that develops software for vocal processing. My background is in growth marketing and growth strategy—I spent several years at Google and YouTube, working on growing subscription and other products.

“We had done a website overhaul and knew that there was a significant organic opportunity to grow the business. So we looked at a variety of different options—vendors, consultants, bringing the functionality in-house.

“But what we loved about CRE is the flexibility.

“Not just having testing experts who can come up with the tests and report on how they’re doing, but also engineering team members who can do the web development when our resources are tied up, as well as a research component to do conjoint studies and pricing-and-packaging research ahead of time. So we ended up with a hybrid model of support from CRE, which made it a very compelling offering.

“It is critical to me that we have a very high burden of proof, and we were very pleased with the scientific rigor that CRE brought to the process. The most fun—or exciting—part of working with CRE is their deep expertise, being able to dive deep on sometimes esoteric areas of marketing and the more scientific domains, which I also enjoy. And it’s clear that they do as well.

“Having thought partners with a variety of experience and exposure to different verticals, different industries, and different types of businesses brings insights, depth, and understanding that is very valuable in thinking about our business from different lenses—which ultimately results in having greater ideas and coming up with things that might be outside the norm, which is frequently what drives the best growth.

“The work that CRE has done hasn’t just impacted core business metrics for us, like subscriber growth, revenue growth, and retention. We’ve also managed to improve the performance of the site and improve the user journey.

“Importantly, it has helped us to change culturally how focused we are on experimentation, testing, and learning—having a growth mindset for the whole organization.

“It’s a phenomenal experience working with Conversion Rate Experts, and I think that pretty much any business would benefit from a relationship with them.”

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

Although the buyer and the user are the same for many businesses, for a surprising number, they aren’t. And when they aren’t, knowing which you are speaking to can make a massive difference.

How one brand flipped its fortune by horsing around

In 2010, a grooming brand for men bet its comeback on that distinction. Old Spice had aged into a punchline, the smell of your grandfather’s medicine cabinet. They made a decision that flipped the brand’s fortunes… a decision about who to talk to.

The result, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” became the most-talked-about grooming ad of the decade. Let’s take it apart, because underneath the surface, there’s a lesson you can use on your next email, headline, or landing page.

The ad starred Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL practice-squad player. He and the crew delivered the whole thing in a single take (after three days of trying) with minimal visual effects.

Here’s the whole script:

Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies’ scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I’m on a horse.

The copy reads as comedy, especially if you know the ad. It’s a delight to read, but this is Copywriting Friday, so we’re going to dig into the serious strategy going on beneath the inanity.

What’s happening beneath the humor

It speaks to the buyer, not the user

Look at the first two words again. Hello, ladies. This is men’s body wash, and it opens by addressing women. That’s not a gag. It’s the strategy.

The brand’s research had told them that women made about 60% of men’s body-wash purchases. So the team stopped writing to the man in the shower and started writing to the woman in the aisle. While competitors fought to persuade men, Old Spice persuaded the other (larger) audience who were making most of the decisions.

From there, they followed what may be the oldest rule in direct response, the one Robert Collier gave us a century ago in The Robert Collier Letter Book: “Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.” So before you sit down to write, consider whether you should separate these two roles:

• The user is the person who’ll actually use what you sell.
• The buyer is the person who chooses it, pays for it, or signs it off.

Are they the same person for your product and service, or not? The distinctions can be subtle but powerful. For example… a developer lives in the project-management tool, but the team lead expenses it. The kid wears the shoes, but the parent buys them. Find the moment their worries diverge: the developer wants fewer clicks, the team lead wants to look good to their boss.

If it turns out that your user and buyer are different, reread your homepage and ask whose concerns it answers. If every headline or bullet speaks to the user, you may be relying on their ability to convince the person who really matters.

Do you trust them to do it right?

The salutation is a three-second filter

“Hello, ladies” does a second job beyond charm. It sorts the room. A woman watching knows immediately that this one is for her.

Calling out your reader in the opening line is one of the oldest moves in copywriting. It works because attention is selective. We lean in when we hear our name, our job, or our problem. If you’ve followed Copywriting Friday, you’ll know that we’ve broken this down before, in an ad written for sports fans who already know everything and in a golf headline that names its exact reader. The Old Spice wrinkle is who gets called out… the buyer instead of the user.

You’ve found your buyer. Now make your first line prove it to them. One test: could the opening be addressed to anyone? If it could, it’s addressed to no one.

Name them outright, the way “Hello, ladies” does. Watch what it does to a generic opener:

• “Managing a remote team is hard.” becomes: “You’re the manager on a team of twelve who have never met in person.”
• “Our software saves you time.” becomes: “You’ve got a board deck due Friday, and half the numbers are still sitting in someone’s inbox.”

The second version doesn’t describe the reader. It drops them into the exact room they’re standing in, and the right reader leans in because it’s unmistakably about them.

It sells the feeling, not the feature

Here’s something that the ad doesn’t do… it never really talks about the product. There are no scent notes, ingredients, or specific claims. Instead we get a boat, an oyster, two tickets to that thing you love, diamonds, and a horse.

As a side note, “that thing you love” is just a perfect line. Makes us smile every time.

But listen, the product is soap. As we’ve seen before, soap is a pretty basic thing. What Old Spice sells is the transformed man and the life around him.

Copywriters call this the benefit of the benefit. It’s not the feature, not even the direct benefit of the feature, but the result the buyer is really shopping for. She isn’t buying scent. She’s buying the dream of a confident, attractive partner, and the ad hands it to her in fifteen seconds of escalating nonsense. Sell the sizzle, not the steak, the old sales maxim goes. This ad is all sizzle. It never once mentions the steak.

Try laddering one of your own features up to the dream:

• Feature is what it is. “256-bit encryption.”
• Benefit is what it does. “Your data is secure.”
• Benefit of the benefit is the life that buys. “You sleep through the night without wondering if today’s the day you get breached.”

Old Spice skips the bottom two rungs and hands the buyer the top one with no shame. Try writing your top rung first. Your features will still be useful later, as you start to build proof.

The comedy is the pitch

In many ads, humor sits on top of the message. It’s a technique to make the “sell” easier to swallow. Here, there’s no ask to soften. The whole thing is comedy, and it works by never slowing down long enough to let you argue.

No waiting. Every beat delivers some new absurdity and snatches it away before you can object. Boat, oyster, tickets, diamonds, horse. Joe Sugarman called this the slippery slide. Each moment’s only job is to get you to the next one, until you reach the bottom without meaning to. Here, the jokes are the grease.

But look at what holds the whole thing together. Nerve. There’s no proof, no comparison, and no guarantee. Just a man in a towel narrating an impossible sequence, never once doubting you’ll follow him onto the horse. Body wash is a commodity, one bottle much like another, so when a product can’t win on features, the voice becomes the product.

Old Spice wins on sheer assurance. (The single unbroken take is that assurance made visible. A cut might break the spell.)

For the rest of us, this means finding the line where our copy hedges instead of being certain. “We think this might help.” “One of the benefits could be…” Soft qualifiers like these allow readers to slow down and start to argue.

We think you should probably cut them wherever you can.

To be clear, we’re not saying that you should make a claim you can’t back up. But where you have the evidence, say it plainly. Confidence, calibrated to what you can prove, reads as competence.

The response that made it legendary

The 30-second spot in 2010 made Old Spice famous to a new generation. What happened five months later made it the kind of thing we want to analyze on Copywriting Friday.

In July, Old Spice put Mustafa back in the bathroom set and had him record short, personalized video replies to fans, journalists, and celebrities who’d mentioned Old Spice online. Over the next two and a half days, the team filmed and posted 186 of these responses… some going from a stranger’s tweet to a finished video in under fifteen minutes. Mustafa replied to celebrities with millions of followers and to ordinary people with barely any.

Here’s one of his replies to Alyssa Milano:

The first day drew 5.9 million YouTube views. By day three, more than 20 million.

But views mean reach, not results. The number that counted showed up on the shelf. According to Nielsen data, Old Spice body-wash sales rose 55% over the three months around the campaign, and up 107% in its strongest month.

The brand supported the campaign with promotions and other marketing, so it’s not possible to attribute all gains to this one ad. But we do know that by the end of 2010, Old Spice was the best-selling men’s body wash in the United States.

An aging punchline became the category leader by deciding, in some significant part, to talk directly to the real buyer.

The lesson here isn’t to “make 186 videos”; it’s the power of the personal touch. Whether celebrities or not, the targets of the videos responded just as we would… if we were singled out by someone who mattered, who answered our specific comment, who said our name.

Being realistic, most businesses can’t staff a film crew for two days, but we can borrow the instinct. Where could a personal, specific, fast reply replace a generic one in your business? A founder’s two-line video answer to a prospect’s question. A support reply that uses the customer’s own words back to them. A thank-you that names what this buyer actually bought. Your channel may be smaller than Old Spice, or bigger. It doesn’t matter. The principle behind this always scales.

The writers you’d like to write like

The genius of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” isn’t the horse, the towel, or the single take, delightful as they are. It’s a handful of decisions any of us can make in our marketing. If you want to write like the writers you admire, try these:

• Write to the buyer, not the user. Of course, you may need to sell to each at different stages of the customer journey, addressing the distinct worries and hopes of both.
• Call them out in the first line. Make the opening unmistakably theirs, so the right reader leans in and everyone else moves on.
• Sell the benefit of the benefit. Skip the feature and the freshness. Hand them the life on the other side of the purchase.
• Win on nerve when you can’t win on features. Cut the hedges, keep the reader moving, and say what you can prove without apologizing for it.
• Answer like it’s personal. Wherever a fast, specific, named reply can replace a generic one, use it.

Not one of these needs a horse or a film crew. They need you to decide who’s holding the wallet, then write as though that person were the only one in the room.

So before you polish your next headline: look at your product, now back to your buyer. Now back to your product, now back to your buyer. Are you sure you’ve been writing to the right one?

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client arranges equity release for homeowners in later life, working through partnerships with established consumer brands.

Research: A team that visitors never met

Releasing equity in your home is a big decision. Our research showed that many visitors to the site were unsure whether (or how) to proceed. The unspoken question most were asking was some version of “Is equity release right for me?”

Those who did take the next step spoke with the client’s information team and came away with a clear picture of the benefits and trade-offs of equity release. For many, that conversation turned the experience around—particularly the team’s empathetic, non-pushy approach. Here’s one customer’s comment that was typical of many:

“Very professional, quick decision, good financial adviser not at all pushy and everything is explained well.”

Based on the feedback we were seeing, the information team was the most persuasive asset the business had. The problem was that none of that empathy or experience registered on the landing page, which opened with a calculator.

How could we introduce the information team before a visitor had to pick up the phone to meet them?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the calculator at the top of the original page. It leads with what it can do for you, and asks for two pieces of information at once.

If we read between the lines, the overriding assumption of this page is that the visitor has already decided this product is for them, and now just wants the number.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we replaced the promise with the question that our research showed visitors were actually asking… and had a real member of the information team ask it for them.

Beneath the new headline—“Is equity release right for me?”—we added a photograph and an introduction:

I’m [name] from the Information Team at [brand]. We can tell you whether you can benefit from a lifetime mortgage in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea – just answer 3 questions.

Then a single question, with a dropdown in place of an empty box:

What is the age of the youngest homeowner?

The calculator still needed the same information. But the page now behaved the way the information team behaved on the phone. First, introduce yourself. Then say how you can help. Then ask one gentle question at a time.

Result: Leads increased by 79%

During the test, we observed a 79% increase in people completing the calculator and submitting their details.

Our client had spent years building a team that customers described as patient and empathetic. By making this persuasive resource more visible, we were following Step 5 of our methodology:

“Each of our clients has had elements within its business that would have been highly persuasive to its prospects but that the prospects never saw. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets and then present them to the prospects at the right time in the buying process.”

We saw something similar with DiamondBack Covers, where the reassurance visitors were looking for already existed inside the business—it just wasn’t on the page they were looking at. It’s worth asking what your customers say they love about you, and then checking whether a new visitor could possibly know it.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client is a major player in the weight-loss subscription market, offering online or in-person services.

Research: Not all conversions are worth the same

Another CRO agency had spent a year tuning the client’s paid traffic funnel, and it was already converting well. Visitors who clicked on an ad went to a landing page and could easily choose between creating an online account or booking an in-person appointment.

The main challenge was that the big wins had slowed. Most of the recent ideas were now closer to meek tweaks than bold tests, so the client asked us to take a fresh look.

Our research showed that customers who booked an in-person appointment converted higher, stayed longer, and got better results than members who subscribed online. In other words, in-person meetings lowered the churn rate and increased the lifetime value (LTV) of subscribers who joined by that route.

Seen through the LTV lens, the landing page was creating a binary decision at a moment of high motivation. Many visitors chose the faster online route, even though the in-person consultation was more likely to deliver better outcomes for both the customer and the business.

If we sent paid traffic directly to the in-person signup page, would the revenue uplift from those “extra” in-person customers outweigh the loss of people who would no longer join online?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original landing page for paid traffic. Visitors who clicked on an ad landed here and could choose between the two enrollment routes. Online enrolment was pitched as the faster option.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we skipped the get-started page and sent paid traffic directly to the in-person booking page:

In addition to defaulting to the higher-LTV option, the “new” landing page:

• Put the current subscription offer front and center.
• Used a proof point by referencing a member’s results with the program.
• Future-paced the in-person meeting (with a photo of two smiling people).

None of this was actually new content, of course. We simply made it the landing page for paid traffic. Organic visitors still saw the original funnel.

Result: Revenue increased 26%

During the test, we observed a 26% increase in revenue.

As we had suspected, online subscriptions dropped during the test. However, the increase in in-person subscriptions more than compensated.

Removing a successful (and revenue-generating) user choice might feel extreme, but the existing funnel had reached a ceiling for meek improvements. This win is a useful reminder that CRO doesn’t always mean improving existing pages. Sometimes it means questioning whether they should exist at all.

(For more on this kind of thinking, see What would definitely work if only you were allowed to do it?)

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the business, and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

Jobs’s restraint was the tell. The launch of the original iPhone wasn’t just a presentation, it was a sales page, performed out loud. Although it’s widely seen as a classic presentation, we also see it as a copywriting masterclass. Nearly every move Jobs makes on that stage is a move you can make on a landing page or in a launch email.

In the following article, you’ll learn how the iPhone launch uses:

• A withheld reveal, and why making people wait often beats leading with your best feature.
• Problem-first selling, and how naming the enemy makes your solution feel inevitable.
• Benefit-first specs, so every number you cite gives the reader a reason to care.
• One idea per screen, the visual discipline that most written pages break.

The agony of waiting

Here’s the first thing worth borrowing, and it’s the hardest for most marketers to do: Jobs refuses to lead with the product. He opens on a promise instead.

”Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”

No phone yet. Just a frame, and a reason to keep listening. He builds credibility before he builds curiosity, reminding the room that Apple has done this twice already, with the Mac in 1984 and the iPod in 2001. By the time he says the word “today,” you already believe something historic is coming, and you still haven’t seen it.

Then he plays a trick. He announces not one product but three:

“…a widescreen iPod with touch controls… a revolutionary mobile phone… and a breakthrough internet communications device.”

He repeats the trio, and repeats it again, faster each time, until the rhythm itself communicates an underlying message.

“These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.”

The repetition wasn’t filler; it was misdirection. Jobs conjured an ordinary version of the story so the real one would hit harder. This is what a good reframe does in copy: it makes you see the same thing in a new and more valuable way. For example, we both know that Jobs’s presentation wasn’t a “sales page performed out loud,” but reframing it that way helps us see its value differently.

After Jobs has revealed that the new device will be called iPhone, he reveals an image of what it will look like on the screen:

It’s a joke, of course, and while the audience is laughing, he pulls the actual prototype iPhone from his jeans pocket, and flashes it at the audience.

“Here it is, but we’re going to leave it there for now.”

And he immediately puts the iPhone back in his pocket. It’s a tease, and Jobs understands that at the right time, teases can cause us to lean in. If there is something we want… close but just out of reach… we want it more.

Jobs sold the problem before he sold the product

Before Jobs tells you why the iPhone is good, he spends several minutes telling you why everything else is bad. He names the enemy directly:

“The most advanced phones are called smartphones, so they say…”

You can hear the air-quotes around “smart” as he speaks. Jobs puts four of them on screen together, like a police lineup: the Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, the Palm Treo, and the Nokia E62.

Then he diagnoses the disease. They all have plastic keyboards “there whether you need them or not,” fixed in place, unchangeable. “They’re not so smart,” he says, “and they’re not so easy to use.”

This is agitation, and it’s doing something specific. The bigger the itch, the better the scratch feels. By the time Jobs shows you the solution, you’re not evaluating a nice new phone. You’re being handed the escape from a problem he’s just made you feel.

We’ve written before about how Apple defines itself against a clumsier rival, in our breakdown of a 1992 ad that pitched the hard way against the easy way. The keynote runs the same play. It also mirrors what we’ve learned about selling to skeptical people: you win them by naming the thing they’re already frustrated by, out loud, before you pitch.

Is there a “plastic keyboard” in your market? Find the clunky, taken-for-granted thing your prospects have quietly learned to tolerate, name it, and make them feel it before you show them the way out.

He answered your objection before you could raise it

The best moment in the whole keynote is about a stylus.

Jobs has just argued for a giant touchscreen with no fixed buttons. There’s an obvious objection to that, and rather than hope you don’t think of it, he thinks of it for you, in your own voice.

“How are we going to communicate this? We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus.”

Long pause.

“No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”

This whole section is really storytelling as strategy. In 2007 a stylus was a real answer, not a silly one. The Palm Treo and Windows Mobile phone both shipped with them. So Jobs raises the objection his audience is genuinely holding, sits in it for a beat so they nod along, then dismisses it with a single word a real person would use:

“Yuck.”

By the time he arrives at his answer, fingers and a revolutionary technology called multi-touch, it’s landing in a fertile field. Of course, Jobs can get away with casually dismissing the stylus because the room loves him. On a cold page, in front of a reader who doesn’t, the more practical move would have been to follow the Steel Man approach, and state the opposing view at its strongest before you answer it.

Either way, the principle holds. Every prospect you have is running a silent list of objections while they read your ad or watch your presentation. You can pretend the list isn’t there, or you can say each item out loud and handle it before it hardens into a reason to leave.

Whatever your reader’s version of “who wants a stylus?” is, you should aim to get there and address it before them.

He turned every spec into a reason to care

When Jobs finally tours the hardware, notice what he never does. He never states a number and leaves it lying there.

The iPhone has a proximity sensor. On its own, that’s a spec, and nobody buys a spec. So he immediately tells you what it’s for:

“…when you bring iPhone up to your ear to take a phone call, it turns off the display… so you don’t get spurious inputs from your face.”

The ambient light sensor isn’t a feature either. It’s a benefit in disguise:

“…adjust[s] the brightness of the display… better user experience, saves power.”

This is the discipline behind one of our most-referenced articles, on why “describe benefits, not features” is bad advice. The trick is pairing each feature with a reason to care. Jobs states the feature and the benefit, so the number becomes proof of a promise rather than a line on a spec sheet.

And the numbers are specific.

• Not ”a sharp screen” but ”160 pixels per inch, highest we’ve ever shipped.”
• Not ”very thin” but ”11.6 millimeters, thinner than the Q, thinner than the Blackjack” (a rival Samsung phone), ”thinner than all of them.”
• Not ”we’ve sold a lot of iPods” but ”our 100 millionth iPod this year.”

As we have said many times, specifics persuade where superlatives bounce off, because a real number reads like a fact and a vague boast reads like marketing. Apple leaned on the same instinct in a later launch we admired, where it borrowed a 100-year-old persuasion strategy to make its manufacturing feel like proof.

Take one feature line from your own page. Does it just state what the thing is? Rewrite it so it states what the reader gets, then let the spec back it up. “256-bit encryption” becomes “your data stays unreadable even if the file is stolen, which is what the 256-bit encryption is for.”

He let other people make his boldest claims

At the point where Jobs wants to argue that Apple builds better phone software than anyone alive, he doesn’t say it himself. He puts a quote on the screen.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

The line is from Alan Kay, one of the genuine pioneers of personal computing, who said it decades earlier. Jobs lets Kay make the immodest claim so he doesn’t have to. Borrowed authority reads as fact; the same words from Jobs would have read as a brag.

He borrows from the room, too. When Apple released the video of the keynote, it included many shots of the audience laughing and applauding. This social proof was the start of people learning to want the phone that other people wanted… and we know what that did for Apple.

You can’t put a laughing keynote crowd on your landing page. But you can put the transferable version of it there: a customer’s exact words, a recognized name from your field, a live count of sign-ups, a wall of real reviews. There are many ways to improve the value of testimonials.

Whose voice could say the boldest true thing about your product better than you can?

One idea per screen

Here’s the technique most copywriters might skip over, because it lives in the visuals rather than the words. Look at what’s actually on Jobs’s slides.

Almost nothing.

When he reveals the iPhone’s name, the screen is one green icon with the word “iPhone” laid over it.

When he tours the phone, it floats alone against a black background, and the spec, “160 ppi," the same 160 pixels per inch from a moment earlier, appears on the device’s own screen, so the claim and the object are fused in one image.

There isn’t a bullet-point list anywhere in sight. Every slide carries exactly one idea, which leaves the audience free to listen instead of racing ahead to read. Your eye and your ear aren’t fighting each other.

Now think about the last landing page you built. Chances are a single screen asked the visitor to read a headline, three feature columns, a testimonial, and two buttons, all at once.

Jobs would have made that five screens, each with one job.

The lesson transfers straight to the page: one message per section, room around it, and nothing competing with the thing you most want seen.

“Are you getting it yet?”

In this article, we’ve covered six moves from one morning in 2007. These are the withheld reveal, the problem named before the pitch, the objection raised in the reader’s own voice, the spec turned into a reason to care, the claims spoken in someone else’s mouth, and one idea alone on each screen.

They look like six separate techniques, but step back and they collapse into one. In each case, Jobs is simply deciding what his audience needs to see next, and giving them only that.

So when you open your next product, an email or a landing page, make sure that it’s a sequence, not a pile. At each point, ask the question Jobs was really answering for those fourteen minutes: What do I want the reader to feel next, and what is the single thing that gets them there?

Are you getting it yet? These are not separate devices.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Churnet Valley Railway is a heritage steam railway running through the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK. The attraction welcomes tens of thousands of visitors each year, and is genuinely loved. It holds a 4.8-star rating on Trustpilot and has thousands of glowing reviews about the trains, the dining experiences, and the team.

Operating Director Greg Wilson wanted to grow bookings on the railway, and was aware that the website had fallen behind the state of the art. It felt like an obvious opportunity, but a full redesign is often a huge gamble. A site can look better and convert worse, and you usually don’t find out which until it’s live.

Greg, an engineer at heart (and a kindred spirit of CRE), wanted to know what was actually wrong before changing anything. And, just as importantly, he needed to protect his existing sales.

Fortunately, at CRE, we always start with research.

Our data-driven strategy

The reason is simple. A big redesign project turns a series of small, knowable decisions into one enormous, unknowable bet.

Our approach lets us do the opposite—break that one big bet into controlled, testable steps, each proven before it ships. When we met with Greg, we proposed exactly that.

Instead of:

• Big decision → big risk → irreversible consequences.

…you get:

• Focused test → low-risk learning → confident rollout.

Our data-driven redesign strategy has three parts:

1. Research first. Before we touch a pixel, our research tells us what is wrong and where the biggest opportunities lie. We don’t want to redesign pages because they look old; we want to redesign them because the evidence says a change will grow the business.
2. A controlled test validates. Every redesign runs as an A/B test against the existing page. The winner is kept; the loser is learned from and discarded. As we tell every new client, you get to keep the winners and throw away the losers.
3. The results signal where to go next. Each result is data about the next move—which page to tackle, which idea to reuse, where the leverage is.

Done this way, a redesign stops being a leap of faith. Every step is a fresh chance to grow conversion, proven before you commit—so you capture the full upside of each win while your downside stays capped. Growth and insurance, in the same motion.

Research: Before you fire up the boiler, lay down the tracks!

In Churnet Valley Railway’s case, we had two clear questions to answer for Greg and his team:

1. Is a website redesign actually warranted?
2. If so, where do the website’s biggest problems lie?

On the first question, the verdict was clear. During user testing, real visitors described the site as “outdated,” “boring,” and “poor design,” while direct competitors were called “modern,” “fresh,” and “family friendly.” Asked which of three similar websites they’d be most likely to explore, participants put Churnet Valley Railway last.

The team’s instinct was right. The website’s design was holding the railway back. Research had found the lever—now it had to find exactly where to pull it.

On the second question, our research turned a vague “the site looks old” criticism into a list of specific, fixable problems. By leveraging our proprietary research tools and methodology, we found a treasure chest of opportunities for improvement.

Here are just a few of them (that we’ll cover in this case study):

• Aside from the “boring look”, the homepage led with a premium Whisky Experience add-on that confused visitor impressions of who the railway was for.
• The dining listing page asked visitors to compare a long stack of similar options, and a scrollmap showed fewer than one in four reached the bottom—a textbook case of the Paradox of Choice.
• In exit surveys, an unusual 23% of non-converting visitors said they were “researching options”—often a polite way of saying the page hadn’t convinced them. Understanding availability and dates came up again and again.
• The customer-service team heard the same handful of questions on every call—what’s included? Can I book for two? What if I’m gluten-free?—questions the website was answering too quietly and too late.

Each of these findings—and many more—became a hypothesis about what to change, and how to test it. Rather than redesign everything at once, we’d prove each change one page at a time, starting with the biggest opportunity on the site.

How to plan a website redesign project

The homepage was the site’s highest-traffic page. By developing and testing a new page there, we’d have a template for every page that followed.

The goal with any data-driven redesign is to develop a template with design patterns that you can reuse or adapt for other pages. Here’s how we planned the redesign project for Churnet Valley Railway:

1. Redesign and test a high-traffic, high-value page. (E.g. The homepage.)
2. Use the winning design as a template for another high-value page such as the Breakfast Train booking page. Test that too.
3. Add new design patterns to the template library as needed, testing each new page as we go.
4. Cascade winning design patterns through all high-value pages, testing and refining.
5. Apply winning insights to other parts of the website to drive continual growth.

By focusing on developing a proven template first, we can maximize opportunity for growth and learning.

The homepage test

The original homepage gave the book tickets CTA the same visual weight as everything else, and led with a niche event rather than a family-friendly offering. (How easy is it to find the ‘Book your tickets’ CTA?)

The variation put the railway (and booking decision) front and center.

The key changes were:

• A new hero with an embedded calendar, so visitors could see available dates and start booking without scrolling.
• Updated navigation panels that flagged what people actually came for. (Rides, dining, and what’s on.)
• Updated the menu to make key items friendlier and more visible.
• Removal of redundant sections that crowded the page rather than driving bookings.
• Steam-and-railway imagery in pole position, so the first thing visitors saw was the experience they’d arrived for.

When a lever works, pull it again

With the homepage proven, we had something more valuable than a single win—the beginnings of a new design pattern. The homepage included the modern design layout, the hero-with-live-calendar, and the clearer path to booking. These were components we could carry to the pages where the money was made.

The dining experiences were the obvious next target. Like the railway itself, the dining trains were wildly popular with people who’d been on them, but far less convincing to prospective bookers online.

The Breakfast Train (+10%)

The original Breakfast Train page sent visitors to a separate website to check operating dates. It had a fairly workmanlike menu, and used photography that felt disconnected from the offer.

We rebuilt it using elements from the homepage win, and added more:

• A “live” calendar and key information at the top—price, departure time, the next available date, and a calendar that visibly marks sold-out and no-service dates, with the Trustpilot widget right below.
• Photography that sells the experience—a single close-up of the breakfast instead of an old collage banner.
• A detailed menu with descriptions, photographs, and clear dietary marks, plus a drinks menu that had been missing entirely.
• A “What’s Included” checklist that built the value into the price.
• Clearer paths to booking, with sticky tab navigation and a repeated Check Running Times & Book Tickets button. Leading with “check running times” rather than “book now” is a textbook use of The Safe Step Principle. (A smaller mental commitment that still leads straight into the booking flow.)

Here’s how the top of the page looked on mobile:

The Midweek Lunch Train (+48%)

Here’s where compounding earns its name. Following the principle that when a lever works, you pull it again, we applied the proven template—adapted only for the content—to a more expensive, less-booked experience—the Midweek Lunch Train.

We had good reason to expect a result. When we asked the railway’s customers why they’d booked, a huge proportion were tied to a specific date, day, or occasion—often far in the future. The old page made visitors jump to a separate site to check dates; the new template put a live calendar front and center.

CRO is never done

The dining listing page—where visitors compare every option, from cream teas to Indian dining—was the page our research had flagged for the Paradox of Choice. We improved it twice.

The dining listing page (+13%)

The original dining listing page contained a stack of eight very similar experiences, and fewer than half of visitors scrolled past the fifth option.

Drawing on designs that had won before, we replaced the stack with categorized sections and smaller cards that highlighted price, departure time, and duration.

We also reduced the size of the Trustpilot widgets, opening up more space. Visitors could now weigh three or four options side by side instead of scrolling endlessly. We also swapped “Book Now” for the safer step of “Check Running Times,” a smaller mental commitment that still leads straight into the booking flow.

A dining FAQ (+9%)

Having delivered big wins during the redesign phase, we moved to an ongoing optimization phase. For example, our interviews with the customer-service team told us that people called with the same questions time and time again. The individual dining pages already had well-used FAQs, but the listing page had none.

So we added a “Have Questions?” FAQ block at the bottom of the page.

The questions were drawn straight from the call logs, with answers written the way the support team explained them on the phone.

The “show” that sold out Christmas

The Polar Express is the railway’s most-visited booking page and one of its highest-priced experiences—a make-or-break event. Yet its hero was, in effect, a poster that showed nothing of what the experience actually delivered.

Meanwhile, our research kept surfacing the same thing—visitors were being persuaded by video, just not on the page. “Little videos on Facebook,” one customer said, “other people’s TikToks.” If video was selling the experience on social, why wasn’t the page using the same tool?

We replaced the static hero with existing footage of the cast, the train, and the nighttime journey, with the title and “Book Tickets” CTA overlaid.

Of course it helps to see the actual video too. Here’s the version from the desktop view of the page (so you can see more):

Quite a difference in feel from the poster, isn’t there?

Perhaps that’s why we couldn’t resist going back to do a second round of method marketing.

What compounding actually looks like

The headline percentages are satisfying, but they’re not the only interesting part of this story.

Another kind of value built up in the spaces between the tests—in the assets, the knowledge, and the momentum that each win handed to the next.

Here’s what genuinely compounded aside from the percentage wins:

• The template. A homepage idea became a product-page template, which then deployed across page after page—getting faster and cheaper to roll out each time.
• The visual assets. A growing library of components, photography treatments, and layouts that each new test could draw on.
• The learnings. Every result—including the ones not shown here—taught us where to look next. Research instigated each test; each result signaled the following move.
• The confidence. Each validated win made the next decision easier to back, and the next idea bolder. Programs like this often get faster and more ambitious as they go along.

The real lesson: You can engineer your way to growth

Step back, and Churnet Valley Railway isn’t really a story about steam trains… although we love them. It’s a story about how you can systematically engineer your way to growth, without betting the business.

The decisions with the most at stake are often the least tested, precisely because they feel so obvious that everyone’s already certain. But confidence isn’t evidence. In a parallel universe, Greg could have approached a design and build agency and experienced a 30% drop in conversions like RealEstateU. Testing is how you capture the full upside of a redesign while keeping that downside off the table—as one of the world’s smartest investors put it:

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
—Charlie Munger

So whether you’re about to redesign your website, hoping a prettier site will convert better—or you’ve already redesigned and watched conversion fall with no idea why—the path forward is the same one we took with Churnet Valley Railway.

No sweeping redesigns. Instead:

1. Research what’s actually wrong.
2. Test before you commit.
3. Keep the winners.

Do this, and a redesign stops being a leap of faith. It becomes what it was for Churnet Valley Railway, the most profitable—and most reliable—growth decision of the year.

What’s next for Churnet Valley Railway?

The conversion rate optimization continues. As usual, every test was added to our proprietary Wins Database, and we continue to look for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Churnet Valley Railway’s business.

This is just one example of a research-led redesign program—a way of modernizing a website without betting the business on a guess.

**If you’d like to talk about redesigning your website in this way, book a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our team.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Greg and the Churnet Valley Railway team for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

The solution comes from two (similar) approaches:

Approach 1: Steel manning

The philosopher Daniel Dennett outlines an effective process for arguing with someone who has opposing views:

1. Attempt to re-express the other person’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that they say, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

The first step of Dennett’s approach has been called steel manning. It’s the opposite of strawmanning, in which you misrepresent the other person’s position or argument so you can easily defeat it. In contrast to a straw man, a steel man is an improved form of the other person’s views—one that’s harder to defeat.

Approach 2: Feel–felt–found

Dennett’s approach overlaps with the “feel–felt–found” technique that is taught in many customer-support call centers:

1. Demonstrate that you understand how the other person feels.
2. Then, describe how you (or someone else) once felt the same as the other person does.
3. Finally, describe how your mind (or someone else’s) was changed, and what you instead found to be true.

Why these approaches work

Steel manning isn’t just good manners. It’s the strongest form of something persuasion researchers have measured for decades—the two-sided argument.

When you think about it, there are three ways to deal with an objection:

• Don’t mention it.
• Mention it, but move on without addressing it.
• Mention it and address it.

Separate studies by Mike Allen (1991) and Daniel J. O’Keefe (1999) both landed on the same finding. If you raise your customer’s objection and then answer it, you persuade more people than if you had never raised it.

The evidence was slightly murkier for advertisers. Raising objections in ads didn’t reliably increase conversion, but it did build credibility and trust.

In marketing, you don’t need to follow Dennett’s four steps literally. The goal is to show that you understand your prospect’s objection so well that they feel properly understood before you answer it.

Steel manning in action: Domino’s cardboard pizza

In 2010, Domino’s put its own customer research on television. Real customer posts, on camera, saying what they actually felt. Comments included:

“Domino’s tastes like cardboard.”

“Mass produced, boring, bland pizza.”

As the video shows, Domino’s didn’t just acknowledge criticism; they presented it more candidly than anyone expected. By giving voice to the strongest version of their customers’ objections before answering them, they made their response far more credible and gave customers a new reason to choose it.

Objection. Counter-objection.

US same-store sales rose 14.3% in the first quarter of 2010. At the time, that was the largest quarterly same-store gain in quick-service restaurant history.

How to apply the above approaches to conversion

The approaches above may sound subtle, but they are powerful.

In both of them, you don’t just present your counterobjection straight. (You don’t just say, “You’re wrong. Here’s the right answer.”)

Instead, you first demonstrate that you understand the other person’s objection, you demonstrate that it’s valid, and then you explain why your counterobjection is a level of thinking deeper, not shallower, than the other person’s. (You effectively say, “I understand what you think, and why, but if you think further…”) This approach allows the other person to save face and not have to backtrack their thinking (which no one likes to do). At no point are they proven wrong; they just arrive at your verdict through extended thinking.

(Note that you’d get nowhere trying to strawman your visitors’ views. Your visitors would simply think, “You don’t understand me.” Strawmanning only works by misrepresenting a third party’s position. You could, of course, do that with your competitor’s arguments. But that’s not defensible, and the best persuasion is defensible.)

So, if your visitors have objections, don’t just contradict them. And certainly don’t ignore them. Address the elephant in the room. Explain why their current thinking is valid. Empathize with why they were reasonable in arriving at those conclusions. And then show them the additional thinking that leads from their conclusions to yours.

When steel manning backfires

If you have read this far and thought this sounds risky, you are asking the right question. So let us put your objection more strongly than you did.

Every argument above is an argument for handing your visitor a reason to leave. You are being asked to print your worst review in your own advertising. Domino’s only got away with it by changing the recipe first. Most companies can’t do that, and the ones that try will simply have reminded a wavering buyer exactly why they were wavering. The safe play is to sell your strengths and stay quiet about the rest.

That is the strongest version of the objection, and two parts of it are right.

• If you can’t win the objection, don’t raise it. If the strongest version of your visitor’s objection is one you can’t honestly beat, voicing it just hands them a reason to leave. Focus instead on fixing your product.
• Don’t plant an objection your visitor never had. Steel manning works on the objection already in the reader’s head. Raise one that never occurred to them, and you’ve introduced doubt for free. This is why customer research comes first. You need to know which objections are real and common, not which ones are theoretically available.

Notice what those two limits have in common. Neither is an argument against steel manning. Both are arguments for knowing which objection you are facing before you open your mouth, which is the same discipline, done earlier.

What about the idea that simply raising a common objection will entrench it in your prospect’s mind? If you’ve done your research, you’ll already know what’s there. Your silence won’t remove an objection; it will just rob you of a chance to counter it.

The challenge steel manning sets is whether our customer hears our answers to their fears, or write their own.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client is a major low-cost carrier that flies millions of passengers every year.

Research: The impact of defaults

When a visitor to the airline’s website searched for a flight, the results page did exactly what you’d expect. It sorted the flights by departure time. As an engineering default, this seems like a sensible decision. The question we always ask is whether it aligns with the visitor’s focus.

So… who is that person?

Passengers who’ve arrived at a low-cost carrier’s booking site have already made an implicit decision—they’re optimizing for price. They chose this airline over a full-service carrier precisely because of cost. Yet the results page was presenting flights in a sequence that prioritized timing over value, and doing so by default—meaning most visitors never changed it. In other words, the pre-set default worked slightly against the audience. Did it take long for users to do the math? Not particularly, but as we’ve said before, business is a game of inches.

What would happen if the listing defaulted to show the lowest prices first?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original page, with flights ordered by departure time.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we changed the default sort order so that flights appeared in cheapest-first order.

Result: Bookings increased by 1.1%

During the test, we observed a 1.1% increase in flight bookings.

On a site that sees millions of travelers a year, this is a change that costs almost nothing to ship and carries real weight. If the uplift holds, it would be worth millions in additional annual revenue.

Defaults are often unremarked upon, but they are never neutral. In this case, the likeliest reason for the uplift is the well-documented reality of how we all read lists: the top gets more attention than the bottom. By ordering the cheapest flights first, we better aligned the website with its users.

Whether it’s airlines or other types of businesses, every default is a decision made on someone else’s behalf… often because “that’s how everyone does it.” That’s why it’s worth asking whether the defaults you use match what’s in your customers’ heads.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of our client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

The ad we’re looking at today is a hundred-year-old answer to that question. It’s for Palmolive Shaving Cream, written by Claude Hopkins… perhaps the original conversion rate optimizer. Hopkins was blunt about the problem he faced:

Practically all the users of shaving cream were wedded to certain brands. Perhaps most of them had used these brands for years, and they liked them. Our problem was to win users from one brand to another.

One can hardly claim in a shaving soap exceptional effects. That is not logical.

Most of Hopkins’s contemporaries would have reached for louder adjectives to try switching customers to their brand, but he went in a different direction. Instead of trying to out-write his rivals, he out-researched them.

And the approach he used is a core part of our methodology, over a century later.

How Hopkins built an ad from the ground up

1. He asked the market what it wanted

Before a word of copy was written, Hopkins went looking for the truth. Here’s how he described what happened in his book, My Life In Advertising:

I sent out some research men to interview men by the hundreds. I asked them what they most desired in a shaving cream.

Notice what this is: voice-of-customer research, run as fieldwork, in the 1920s. Three desires came back clearly. The market wanted abundant lather, quick action on a tough beard, and lather that lasted long enough to finish the whole shave.

That list became an input for everything that followed. If you are trying to persuade people to buy something, knowing what they want (in their own words) is extraordinarily valuable.

How could you use this? Our five golden questions exist to pull exactly that out of your customers. The first move in Hopkins’s method is the one that many marketers skip. If research seems like a lot of effort, keep in mind that almost all of the Win Reports we’ve published have their roots in deep research.

2. He measured what mattered

You might think that the three desires discovered above were all the gold dust Hopkins needed to create a great ad, but he had something else in mind. He took the customers’ wishlist to V. C. Cassidy, Palmolive’s chief chemist, and told him:

These are the factors men want. They may get them in other shaving creams, but nobody yet has told them. Give me actual data on these results as applied to Palmolive Shaving Cream.

Note that Hopkins wasn’t asking the chemist to invent advantages, but to measure the things men already said they wanted. The figures came back one by one:

• Men wanted abundant lather. Cassidy proved Palmolive multiplied itself in lather 250 times.
• Men wanted quick action. Tests showed the beard absorbed 15% of water within one minute, enough to make the hair wax-like for cutting.
• Men wanted lather that lasted. The chemist proved that it retained creamy fullness for ten minutes on the face.

Because Palmolive was the first soap company to understand what mattered to its market, it was also the first to publish hard numbers. And, as we know, hard figures often persuade readers where adjectives bounce off.

How could you use this? Which of your general claims could you replace with a measured figure? We understand that regular readers will have seen this advice before, but we repeat it because it matters. It worked 100 years ago; it still works now.

Consider the top of our CRO agency page (highlighting added):

3. He said it out loud… first

Once Hopkins had asked and measured, he could say things that no rival had bothered to say despite having similar products. Here’s a full version of the ad that Hopkins created:

Don’t be surprised to see that Hopkins highlights key aspects of the product in the left-hand column, but he doesn’t leave it there. He starts the main copy by showing his work:

If you were a man who shaved regularly, wouldn’t you be interested in a brand that had done its research… and then delivered on what 1,000 other men said they wanted?

They wanted abundant lather:

They wanted quick action:

They wanted foam that lasted:

As Hopkins said:

Probably other shaving creams could meet the same specifications… But we were the first to give figures on results. And one actual figure counts for more than countless platitudes.

Taking ownership of common properties wasn’t a new strategy for Hopkins. He’d proven it decades earlier by describing the sterilization process that Schlitz beer (and every other brewery) used… but hadn’t mentioned to drinkers. (Advertisers would later name this technique the preemptive claim.)

When you know what to say, the marketing writes itself

We could talk about the many other techniques the ad uses, but that risks obscuring the takeaway.

Strip this ad back, and the product is ordinary. Palm oil, olive oil, lather, and a shave job a dozen rivals could match. Hopkins’s method was not ordinary, but neither was it outrageously complicated or out of reach for companies today, especially given the tools we all have at our disposal:

1. Ask your market what it wants.
2. Measure your product or service against those desires.
3. Be first to say them out loud, consistently, and in figures if at all possible.

A century on, that loop is still one of the most profitable ideas in marketing. And yet a surprising number of companies still struggle to “wear out the boot leather” when it comes to research, and consequently leave money on the table. Often, a lot of money.

Knowing your market makes everything easier. Imagine Hopkins sitting down to write, his notes at his side. With his research collected, the copy would have more or less written itself.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client is one of the world’s largest document editing services, working with researchers, academics, and businesses across dozens of countries.

Research: When the sale comes too soon

When we analyzed user journeys through the website, a pattern emerged. A typical visitor would land on the homepage, click the “Get Quote” button in the header, and move directly to a quote form.

That’s good, right?

Well, no. As it turned out, the quote form asked questions that some visitors weren’t ready to answer. These included:

• The type of document they were submitting.
• The service level they required. (E.g. “substantive editing” versus “copy editing.")
• Their target word count.
• Their desired turnaround time.

These were reasonable questions for someone who already understands the service, but they created friction for first-time visitors. For example, the form didn’t explain the difference between “substantive editing” and “copy editing.”

Without knowing more about the service, visitors had no frame of reference for the options in front of them. Faced with decisions they couldn’t confidently make, many left.

At least, that was our hypothesis. How could we test it?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original homepage, with the prominent “Get Quote” button in the header. Visitors who clicked it were taken straight to the quote form.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s a mockup of the variation. As you can see, we went for the easiest way to robustly test our hypothesis… by removing the “Get Quote” button entirely.

This was a tiny change, but a bold test… because we were taking away the main above-the-fold purchase CTA. As we say on page 74 of our book, Making Websites Win:

Small improvements take ages to detect. So you should aim for bold, targeted changes, for the following reasons:

1. Each change gets you more profit (an 80% improvement gives four times the benefit of a 20% improvement, obviously).
2. It’s more fun and interesting.
3. It’s much quicker.

By removing the CTA, we radically changed the user journey for many visitors. Instead of jumping to the form, they were forced to find the thing that they wanted. In doing so, they encountered:

• Clear descriptions of each service, including who it was for and what it included.
• Credentials of the team doing the work, and the experts in each area.
• Trust signals, including the big-name clients they served in each service area.
• Quote CTAs on each service page, which felt like a more natural next step.

Result: Conversions increased by 39%

During the test, we observed a 39% increase in conversions. This is a huge win, but what does it suggest?

Although the “Get Quote” button worked well for existing customers, for everyone else it was a shortcut past the education and confidence they needed to convert. As we say in our article on the Safe Step Principle:

Visitors are more likely to continue when the next step feels safe, appropriate, and proportionate to what they already know.

Does that mean that the button should never return? Absolutely not, but this result suggests that we’d want to test some significant changes to the quote form before bringing it back.

Which is exactly what we did.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the business, and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

This, of course, is the famous speech from Oliver Stone’s movie, Any Given Sunday. Played by Al Pacino, the coach Tony D’Amato delivers one of the most-quoted motivational set pieces in movie history, building from a near-whisper to a dramatic roar.

Watch it with a copywriter’s eye, though, and something else emerges. Beneath the drama, it’s a lesson in persuasion that covers many of the tools and techniques we talk about in this series. (Plus, the metaphor at the heart of the coach’s speech, that life is a game of inches, is one of the truest descriptions of conversion rate optimization (CRO) we know. As we’ve said before, a slight edge is all you need.)

Here’s the video. There’s barely any swearing, but the coach does let one four-letter word fly at the emotional peak, so you may want headphones if you’re at your desk or around little ears.

It opens with a whisper (0:00–0:53)

The first thing to notice is how small D’Amato starts. No fireworks or clipboard-slamming. Just a tired admission: “I don’t know what to say, really." Conversely, the surprising lack of trying pulls us in. It takes real strength and confidence to show weakness, doesn’t it?

Great advertising has done the same. When Volkswagen set out to sell a small, odd-looking German car to a 1950s America that loved its cars big, Doyle Dane Bernbach didn’t crowd the page and shout. The famous “Think Small” ad (1959) handed most of the space over to a plain background and let a tiny Beetle sit quietly in the corner.

Like D’Amato’s opening, VW’s ad pulls us in by sitting back. It “reads” as surprising. The opposite of the strident sales pitch we might have expected.

The confession (0:54–1:26)

Having already set a low temperature, D’Amato does something even riskier. He turns the confession on himself.

“I look around, I see these young faces, and I think… I made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.”

As we’ve said before, an admission against your own interest is a shortcut to being believed. Nobody lies to make themselves look worse. When D’Amato owns his failures, the room starts listening.

We’ve covered damaging admissions before. Avis built an entire campaign on a confession that few companies would volunteer today: “We’re only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.”

Volkswagen (again) ran a famous full-page ad under the one-word headline “Lemon,” pointing at one of its own cars pulled off the line for a blemish you’d never have spotted.

In both of these examples, the admission is the proof. You can do the same in writing. Your prospect already knows you want their money, so a flat list of strengths slides straight off them. Admit a real limitation first—this isn’t the cheapest option, it won’t suit everyone, we got this wrong for years before we fixed it—and your other claims start to carry weight. We’ve explored the move in our Copywriting Friday on admitting your flaws, and seen how the sales letter behind Cook’s Illustrated opens by conceding the market is drowning in recipes.

Life’s a game of inches (1:27–3:15)

Out of that low, honest place, D’Amato reaches for the idea that will carry the rest of the speech.

“You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football. Because in either game—life or football—the margin for error is so small. One half a step too late or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, and you don’t quite catch it.”

Two things happen at once here, and both are worth understanding.

First, D’Amato sets out “inches” as a single controlling idea (and never lets it go). From this moment on, everything gets pulled through the same lens: football, his ruined life, the team, the final push. It all focuses on that single controlling idea. Strong marketing copy often does the same, ensuring that readers remember one thing deeply rather than many things vaguely.

David Ogilvy’s classic 1958 Rolls-Royce ad is the most famous copywriting example of this. It stemmed from his discovery that the cars were built around an obsessive standard of quietness, which became the controlling idea for the ad.

Notice how the ad doesn’t just claim that the car is quiet in the abstract; it gives the reader something extraordinarily concrete:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”

Back in the locker room, D’Amato’s speech gets concrete too. Instead of urging the team to “try harder” or “stay focused,” he describes the half-a-step or half-a-second that might make the difference.

This is concrete language, and concrete language out-persuades abstract language every time. Your audience can picture something concrete, and a picture feels true in a way a generality never does. It’s the specificity principle that runs through all good direct response, through our guide to proof, and through the model lines in our Copywriting Friday on getting specific with proof. “Many customers” persuades no one, but “103,500 users” does. “Save money” is forgettable, but “$340 a year off your energy bill” is far more likely to stick.

The fork in the road (3:16–3:47)

As the speech peaks, D’Amato’s rhetoric shifts again:

“Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.”

This is what copywriters call a crossroads close. By collapsing a messy, frightening situation into two paths, he makes the comfortable option (doing nothing) the losing one. If you’ve read our article on persuading skeptical people, you may remember this exact technique from the SawStop video.

“It’s the choice between a wound you can treat with a band-aid, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses.”

Put like that, keeping your old saw stops feeling safe. That’s the job in your own copy, too. The status quo is your real competitor, because most prospects don’t choose a rival; they choose to do nothing. Our task, as marketers, is to explain why standing still is a costly decision, rather than a comfortable default.

What are you gonna do? (3:48–4:10)

After all that, you’d expect a command. A “now get out there and win.” Instead, D’Amato ends on the quietest note of all.

“Now I can’t make you do it… Now, what are you gonna do?”

By closing on a question rather than an order, he hands the power and ownership back to his team. This works because we tend to feel more committed to choices and conclusions that we feel we’ve made ourselves.

You don’t even need a literal question to pull this off. For more than thirty years, The Economist has handed readers the decision and trusted them to reach it. Here’s David Abbott’s classic 1988 poster.

There’s no call to action here. The ad sets the scene and lets you arrive, unprompted, at the thought it wants you to have. And because you supply the conclusion yourself, it’s more likely to stick.

Although CTAs are incredibly important, the best ones feel like the safe next step that you have decided to take yourself. They don’t shove; they frame the next move as the reader’s to make, then get out of the way. A good CTA reads as the natural end of the reader’s own reasoning. Here’s where you are, here’s what’s possible, the next step is yours.

A few inches at a time

If we strip away the drama, D’Amato’s speech is a powerful persuasion template.

He quiets the room, earns belief, anchors everything to a vivid idea, and frames the moment as a critical choice. Then, and only then, does he hand the decision back to his audience.

For those of us dedicated to growing businesses, our own and other people’s, the controlling idea also lands especially hard. The media rightly celebrates the big swings in business, but growing is mostly a game of inches. Remorseless and relentless improvement. The clearer headline here, a stronger piece of proof there, one bold test that finally moves the number.

You don’t earn those inches by tweaking timidly. You earn them the way D’Amato’s team does, by fighting for each one with everything you’ve got.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

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Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Our client is a major flower and gift delivery company, serving customers across multiple countries and languages.

Research: It’s been emotional

Sending flowers or other gifts differs from most ecommerce journeys in one particular way. Somewhere in the flow, the customer will move from shopping to “creating”. They’ll take a moment to write the personal message that will travel with the gift.

That’s the kind of difference that we pay attention to, because psychology has interesting things to say about action and creation. For example, the Ikea Effect has shown that we place significantly more importance on things we have “made” ourselves… even if the “making” is fairly minimal. Similarly, taking action represents a commitment of sorts, and as the persuasion principle of consistency shows, we’re more likely to finish the things that we’ve started. Finally, the act of writing a personal message can’t help but connect us to the reaction that it will create, future pacing the final step.

What would happen if we brought that moment of personal investment higher up the funnel?

The original checkout (or control)

The original flow proceeded in a logical sequence: browse > select a bouquet > enter details > write your message > pay.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we moved the card message step to immediately after product selection.

Result: Orders increased by 22%

During the test, we observed a 22% increase in orders. Moving the card message to the front of the funnel, before we asked anyone to pay, turned more browsers into buyers.

A customer who has written their message has already made something personal, invested some effort, and pictured the reaction it will bring. These are each psychological nudges, and by the time the payment step appeared, fewer people hesitated.

The lesson reaches well beyond gifting. We’ve had similar wins for fintech clients who allowed customers to personalize their credit cards. Many purchase journeys contain a “yes” moment of personal investment. If yours does, find it and test bringing it forward. A customer who has started to create is a customer who wants to finish.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the business, and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Google has recently published its official guidance on the subject. It’s worth reading carefully—not because it’s revolutionary, but because it isn’t. Google’s answer is, in effect, do what you should have been doing all along—better SEO, better content, and a site that is useful, compelling, clearly structured, and provides the proof required to convert visitors.

What Google actually said

Google’s guide makes one thing very clear. Optimizing for AI search is not a new discipline. In fact, it’s remarkably similar to the ranking advice they’ve given for decades. Creating content that people find unique, compelling, and useful will do more for your AI search visibility than any tactical intervention.

The sites that perform best in AI-powered search are those that create genuinely useful, non-commodity content—demonstrating real expertise and first-hand experience, with strong technical foundations, a clear information hierarchy, and no barriers to crawling.

In other words, better websites.

That’s significant because a lot of the money currently being spent on “AI optimization” is going toward something that shouldn’t exist as a distinct category. AEO and GEO aren’t new disciplines. They’re the same job under different names, and Google has explicitly said so.

When agents do the research, the bar for evidence rises

Around the same time, Google’s web.dev team published guidance on building websites for AI agents—software that browses, evaluates, and completes tasks on behalf of users. The checklist is recognizable to anyone who has ever run a usability or accessibility audit—semantic HTML, clear page hierarchy, stable layouts, predictable interfaces.

A button that is hard for an agent to find is almost always a struggle for humans, too. What makes a site legible to a machine also makes it clearer for a person. In other words, as Google itself notes, building for agents is a reason to recommit to building well.

But there is an important shift to understand. A person evaluating your site reads between the lines. They infer, they give you the benefit of the doubt, and hunt around for the missing detail. An agent is more systematic and less forgiving. Vague value propositions, thin proof, unanswered evaluation questions—the weaknesses that have always quietly suppressed your conversion rate—now also suppress your AI visibility.

And the solution is the same—better websites.

Surely something has changed?

Of course, it would be naive to say that nothing has changed. Here are three to focus on.

• Monitoring. You can no longer judge performance solely by rankings and organic traffic. You now need to know which AI surfaces cite you, for which queries, from which pages—across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the assistants your buyers actually use. That’s a new monitoring discipline, and it’s worth investing in.
• Delivery. Agents and AI crawlers need your important content available in the served HTML, not reliant on client-side JavaScript, or personalization layers that hand a machine an incomplete page.
• Earned authority. Building an accurate, consistent third-party presence—citations, reviews, mentions in credible sources—is now a visibility input in its own right. But it sits on the same foundation—you can’t earn a clear off-site reputation without a clear on-site proposition.

Notice the shape of all three. They’re a thin layer on top of a thick foundation. They pay off only once the content, structure, clarity, and trust signals beneath them are sound. Get the order wrong, and you’re investing in the visibility of a site that gives no one anything worth citing.

A question that exposes the real problem

If you’re thinking about where to invest in AI, ask yourself the following question:

“Could an AI agent, reading only your website, produce a specific, credible, well-evidenced recommendation of you to someone in your target market?”

If the honest answer is no, you have a CRO problem—and you had it long before agents existed. Investing in making your site agent-ready is the same as investing in CRO done properly. The same improvements that lift conversion rates now also shape how AI systems understand, navigate, and recommend your business.

Most companies are currently asking:

“How do we get AI systems to mention us?”

But Google’s guidance points to a more useful question:

“How do we become the easiest company for both humans and machines to do business with?”

These two questions lead to very different investment decisions. The first leads to content farms, AI-specific formats, and an ever-rotating set of tactics with short shelf lives. The second leads to improvements that compound across traditional search, AI-powered search, agent interactions, and conversion rates. If you fix something properly, it will pay you back every time a customer or machine interacts with your business.

The core strategy

What strikes us most about Google’s guidance is how closely it corresponds with what CRO practitioners have been arguing for nearly two decades. CRO is the only discipline that was already answering the questions an AI agent will ask on a buyer’s behalf—is there a clear, persuasive proposition, backed by proof, with the buyer’s objections addressed, expressed so plainly that a stranger could repeat it?

As we move into this new era, the companies that act first will be hardest to catch. Not because they found a new tactic, but because they stopped looking for one.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

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We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

That’s exactly what Janice Jacobs, VP at Marketing & Ecommerce of Journey Health & Lifestyle, valued about working with CRE:

“The CRE team made it their business to understand ours—immersing themselves in our customer journey before ever touching a single test.

“That curiosity built a foundation which led to smart, strategic experiments across our full funnel, from landing pages to checkout.

The results spoke for themselves.”

Journey Health is a health and mobility brand designed to help older adults stay active, independent, and comfortable in everyday life.

Their range of power chairs, scooters, upright walkers, rollators, and daily living products are built for ease of use, portability, and dependable support, helping customers move confidently at home, outdoors, and on the go.

One way we build that understanding is through Method Marketing, where we become the customer ourselves.

That may sound unusually hands-on, and it is, but when you experience the journey as a real customer, you spot things that are hard to see otherwise—moments of uncertainty, hidden friction, missing reassurance, and questions that need answering before someone feels ready to buy. Those insights are where the biggest wins often hide.

If you’d like us to do the same for you, book a free strategy session. In the session, one of our CRO experts will help you identify what’s limiting your website’s growth.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Copywriting Friday highlights the tools and techniques of persuasive content. Some of the examples may seem dated, but the principles are timeless (and critical for conversion rate optimization). Enjoy.

Getting past that barrier is a key job of any message that seeks to persuade. Ads that convince us that a purchase is best for both parties win. Those that don’t, fail.

Our Copywriting Friday articles are full of techniques that copywriters use to break through the barrier, but today we are looking at something a little different. An ad that attempts to remove the suspicion at the source.

The signed advertisement

In 1913, an ad ran for a brand-new car called the Reo the Fifth. It cost $1,095 (or $35,000 if adjusted to today’s prices). It was the “Farewell Car” of one of America’s most famous automotive engineers, R.E. Olds, a person who had spent 25 years figuring out how to build quality cars.

The headline is five words:

“If I Bought a Car.”

And the byline reads:

“By R.E. Olds, Designer.”

If you were truly in the ad’s target market—someone looking to spend over one thousand dollars on a new car—would you skip a personal message like this from an industry titan?

Here’s the full ad from one of our reference books of classic copywriting.

The ad wasn’t just successful in its time, it has been studied by copywriters ever since.

In this article, we’ll pick out four specific techniques, and show how you can use them in your own marketing. As you might expect for an ad that’s 113 years old, it uses “men” in the generic sense to mean buyers and customers. We’ve kept the original quotes intact rather than rewrite them, but don’t let the archaic language distract you. There’s a lot to learn here.

Start your engines: four techniques you can use today

1. Put the maker in the buyer’s seat

The ad’s premise is reinforced right there in the first paragraph:

Olds isn’t telling you what you should want. He’s telling you what he would want—and he happens to be the country’s most experienced person on the subject. The buyer and the maker are on the same side of the table, looking at the same list of requirements.

Most ads work the other way. The seller stands across from the buyer and tries to talk them into a transaction. The buyer’s defenses are up by default. As we’ve written in our guide to earning your customers’ trust, the most persuasive position is the one where you’ve quietly moved around to the buyer’s side.

As we’ve seen, the ad’s headline and byline perform this maneuver with great economy. By the time you’ve reached the first body paragraph, the question in your head isn’t “What’s this guy trying to sell me?” It’s “What does he know that I don’t?”

A modern parallel: You see the same move today when a founder or engineer explains the product themselves. When James Dyson appears to tell you what still frustrates him about cleaning (and how he’s fixed it), he’s doing exactly what Olds did—standing next to you, not across from you. “This is what I want for myself”… he’s saying… “and for you.”

The same instinct powers the best about-us pages on websites, or the makers who take us through their trade-offs in minute detail.

2. Build credibility by admitting what you could have skimped on

As you read the ad, you may notice something unusual. Olds keeps telling you, in dollars, what each decision cost him. Here are just three examples from a pattern that the ad repeats over and over:

In these cases, and the others, Olds is explaining why he chose to spend money that he didn’t “need” to spend.

As we discussed in our article about competing with giants, this technique is what copywriters call a damaging admission. In essence, it involves openly volunteering something that, on the face of it, hurts your sale. Done badly, it just hurts. Done well, it does the most valuable thing any piece of copy can do: it makes everything else you say more believable.

The mechanism in the Reo the Fifth ad is subtle. By repeatedly volunteering what he could have done to make more money on each car, Olds reframes the whole ad. You stop hearing it as “buy my car” and start hearing it as “let me show you my work.” When someone openly admits what could count against them, you’re more likely to believe them on the points that don’t.

Notice the second move in that opening line: “But you might lose three times that by the lack.” He doesn’t just admit the cost, he immediately reframes it as the reader’s savings. The structure is: here’s what I could have skimped on; here’s why you’d regret it if I had.

3. Flood the reader with specifics

Once you start counting the numbers in this ad, you can’t stop. In the Durability section alone:

But it’s not just numbers—it’s all kinds of specific details. While reading this ad, we learn of three different kinds of steel, the exact size of the brake drums, and why Olds chooses a 45-horsepower drivetrain to power a 35-horsepower car. And much more.

The cumulative effect is slightly overwhelming, and that’s the point. A general claim like “we use quality parts” might well trigger a reader’s “you-would-say-that” defense. A specific claim (“11 of them Timken; 4 at High Duty”) doesn’t, because the reader has nothing to argue with. The specificity is the proof.

As copywriting great Gary Bencivenga puts it: “Never make your claim bigger than your proof." It’s a principle we’ve made the centerpiece of an entire guide to proof and a separate Copywriting Friday on a similar theme. The test is brutally simple: could a competitor truthfully write the same sentence? If the answer is yes, consider rewriting it.

Here’s a great example, from Winkbeds:

We put our beds in an independent testing facility and do 80,000 punishing compression repetitions, simulating over 20 years of sleeping to ensure long term durability.

4. Close on trust, not on price

The final section of the ad is titled “Men’s Faith In Me.” The dated framing aside, the structure of the close is worth studying carefully:

This is what good founder-story copy actually looks like. It’s a value statement, delivered at the moment of decision, by the one person whose word matters most—the person who’d be personally embarrassed if the product fell short.

Notice that there’s no “buy now” at the end of the ad. There’s barely even a price—the $1,095 sits quietly in the photo caption. What there is, instead, is a founder’s implicit promise: I have spent 25 years earning your trust, and I would rather earn less per car than risk losing it.

Trust in business may be in shorter supply these days, but we can still recognize it when it happens. Whether it’s Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket ad, Darn Tough’s lifetime guarantee, or Zappos’ year-long returns—each one closes on the same idea: we’d rather keep your trust than win this one sale.

A closing thought (as we drive our Reo into the sunset)

If you strip away the date and the typography, the persuasive engine of this ad still runs today:

1. Put the maker in the buyer’s seat.
2. Volunteer what your standards cost you.
3. Flood the reader in specifics no competitor could honestly copy.
4. Then close not on price, but on the promise that the person whose name is on the door cares more about the world’s good opinion than a few extra dollars.

As Olds himself put it:

“I would never buy a car which the makers skimped, and I never shall try to sell one.”

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

Can you see how small the change is?

Our client is an online academy that sells specialist, skill-building courses to a global audience of enthusiasts and hobbyists. Their thing is taking complex, technical subjects and turning them into plain-English training that anyone can follow.

Research: Have you really solved the problem?

If there’s one strategy that we’ve emphasized time and time again in these reports, it’s the value of providing reassurance at critical moments in a sales funnel. But just how sensitive is the placement of that reassurance?

Our research showed that the client’s prospects had fairly typical concerns about purchasing the online courses. These included:

• Is it worth the money—and can I afford it?
• Will it be pitched at my level, or too advanced for someone like me?
• What if I change my mind?
• Will I lose access if the company disappears?

The course pages worked hard to address these kinds of concerns on every product page. For example, they provided the following bullets very close to the “Enroll Now” CTA.

• Course access for life.
• 60-day money-back guarantee.

Considering the close proximity of these bullets, most reasonable people might have marked these concerns as handled, and moved on. But then again, we’ve made millions for clients by doubling down on “solved” problems…

What would happen if we moved the reassurance even closer to the Enroll Now button (and the visitor’s moment of truth)?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original page, with the primary call-to-action top right.

And this zoomed-in view makes it easy to see how close the reassurance already was to the main CTA.

The tested pages (or variations)

For the test, we pitted two variations against the original. Both of them added microcopy to the button itself.

The microcopy tested the two types of reassurance that the pages were already using… just a few pixels away:

• Variation 1: Value reminder: “Instant access. Lifetime updates.”—reinforcing what the buyer gets when they commit.
• Variation 2: Risk reversal: “60-day money-back guarantee”—taking the risk off the table entirely.

The value reminder spoke to what buyers would gain; the guarantee removed what they were afraid to lose. The rest of the page, including course content, price, and existing reassurance bullets, stayed exactly the same.

Result: Variation 2 increased sales by 29%

During the test we observed conversion rate increases with both variations. The value reminder (variation 1) added 10% to the site’s sales. This alone would be a significant improvement for any business.

But risk reversal won outright. Variation 2 increased the client’s sales by 29%. A money-back guarantee was likely powerful here because it addressed several of the prospects’ concerns all at once. (Is it worth it? Is it right for my level? What if I change my mind?)

What’s striking though—even to us hardened experts—is just how much difference this small change (of positioning) actually made. How many product pages out there have the right reassurance, but the wrong proximity?

As we’ve written before, the closer reassurance lands to the moment of truth, the bigger its impact.

What’s next

We added the test to our Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of our client’s business. In fact, the next test we ran on the microcopy raised the client’s sales by another 46%… maybe we’ll cover that in a future Win Report.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

• Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
• Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
• Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
• Schedule your FREE website strategy session with one of our renowned experts.

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

Download a free copy of our Amazon #1 best-selling book, Making Websites Win, recommended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Moz, Econsultancy, and many more industry leaders. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified whenever we publish new articles or have something interesting to share.

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools and techniques. Many readers tell us they have doubled their sales by following the advice in these articles.

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

If you want to join our team—or discover why our team members love working with us—then see our “Careers” page.

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!