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.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how adding two free services to a checkout page increased orders by 9% for a South American gift company.

Our client delivers gifts internationally, serving visitors in several languages and currencies.

Research: The dropout came at the very last step

When we analyzed the client’s funnel, analytics showed a high proportion of visitors dropping out at the payment stage of the checkout. These were people who had already chosen a gift, entered their billing details, found and entered the recipient’s delivery address, and selected a delivery date. In other words, they had put in a lot of work only to leave without paying.

Why?

If you’ve read our article on the five golden questions, you may remember question four, which we ask visitors right after they convert.

What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us?

In this case, a high proportion of customers said that the final price almost stopped them. Many of them mentioned wanting a discount code to feel like they were getting value for money.

While discount codes or price reductions can make sense in some circumstances, they shouldn’t be the default answer. Price objections often signal that visitors are unclear about the value proposition.

When we looked at that final checkout page through the visitors’ eyes, we saw:

• The gift and its price.
• The sales tax.
• The delivery fee.
• And then finally, the total.

Every line on the checkout was for something that the customer was paying for. Was there a way to reassure visitors about the value of the products and protect our client’s margins?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original checkout page. The order table name-checked the gift, then listed the subtotal, sales tax, delivery cost, and total.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we added two rows to the order table, directly beneath the gift. Each one named a service the customer was already receiving and included the FREE price.

The two additional rows read:

• Premium Service: Seasonal products and ingredients selected and hand-wrapped by our white-glove team.
• 100% Satisfaction Guarantee: Committed to making you and your loved ones happy!

And in the price column, both items were listed as FREE.

Neither service cost our client a cent beyond what they were already spending, because both were already included as standard. In the variation, we simply reminded the visitors of benefits that were part of their purchase.

Result: Orders increased by 9%

During the test, we observed a 9% increase in orders.

Keep in mind that the only thing that changed was the mental arithmetic the visitors did on that final page. A price is never judged on its own. It is judged against what the customer is getting for it. That is the framing effect at work, and the existing order summary was framing the final purchase as exclusively painful.

Our research showed that visitors were looking for an extra reason to feel good about the transaction, so we gave them two in the same table as the total.

The lesson generalizes across markets. As we’ve said before, reassurance that already exists is often worth far more at the moment of payment than anywhere else.

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!

Churnet Valley Railway is a heritage steam railway running through the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK. Founded in 1992 and run with the help of 250 volunteers, it welcomes around 110,000 visitors a year to its steam trains, old-fashioned coaches, and dining experiences.

You can read more about our work together in our case study: How a website redesign delivered the best year ever for Churnet Valley Railway.

A short video interview with the client

A transcript of the video

Jack
“Working with Conversion Rate Experts, the results have been fantastic. The footfall has gone up massively. Our dining train tickets are selling like hotcakes. Sales at the railway have increased quite dramatically, because we sell out of tickets far quicker than we’ve ever done before.

Greg
“Since we started working with CRE, every single dining train we’ve operated in 2026 has been full.

“We’ve broken the million‑pound barrier for the first time ever. That’s income. We’ve never achieved that. We’ve never been close.

Jack
“We used to be running at 40% capacity some days. We’re now regularly running at 80, 90, 100%, which we wouldn’t have done without the work that we’ve been doing with CRE.

Greg
“The experience with CRE has been excellent. They’re clearly top of their game.

“We find ourselves in a position to add more capacity because we know we can sell it. That adds six figures.

Jack
“I was concerned, because we were playing with the website, and the website had been mainly Greg’s baby. But those concerns were soon put to rest when the first set of optimizations started taking effect and we saw sales starting to snowball.

Greg
“It’s an ongoing project. I don’t know when we’re going to bring it to an end, because at the core of all of this is a business, and we make money by bums on seats.

“In every metric that we use, there is more of it—be it passengers, food eaten, or cash in the bank. It works.

Jack
“It’s been incredible what it’s done for the railway. It’s a no-brainer in my eyes. It’s worth every penny.

“My name is Jack Ilczyszyn, Assistant General Manager for the Churnet Valley Railway in Staffordshire.

Greg
“I’m Greg Wilson, General Manager. We have a mix of normal train services, dining train services, steam trains, and old-fashioned-style coaches.

Jack
“The railway started in 1992. We’ve got 250 volunteers, and about 110,000 people visit us a year.

“We were working on SEO before, and that was going really, really well, but it was reaching its peak.

Greg
“We’d invested heavily in digital marketing. We were at the top of every conceivable search, but we still weren’t getting bums on seats.

Jack
“We did quite a bit of stuff off the website—radio adverts, magazines, billboards, and things like that—casting a net and seeing what returned. And more often than not, it wasn’t returning.

Greg
“Our SEO guy said we had a high cart abandonment rate. To get the level of customers that we needed to fill our trains, we’d have had to increase traffic to the website by 2500%. It’s just not going to happen.

Jack
“We just needed that expertise and guidance to make our website—and the railway—easier to communicate with and easier for people to purchase from.

“We invited Conversion Rate Experts to come up to the railway. They came for a train ride and a behind-the-scenes tour of the railway and how we run things here.

Greg
“The perforation relationship is exceptional. It all adds to the fact that they care, and they’re passionate about what we’re delivering as much as what they’re delivering for us.

Jack
“Working with Conversion Rate Experts has been fantastic, really. It’s taught me loads. All the information they gathered was really interesting—testing our website, finding where the problems were, where people fell out of the funnel. And what was great was that the responses were instant as well.

Greg
“We might be talking coding problems one day, payment integration the next, or something even more obscure, such as on-train dining. They’ve always got a department that can help you, and we don’t see all those extras on our bill. It’s just part of the deliverables.

Jack
“I love CRE’s methodology. They used heatmapping and user testing. Being able to break down and look at who was using the website and how it was being used, I thought, was fantastic.

Greg
“Their research took out the doubt about why things weren’t performing.

“I didn’t appreciate at the time that the adjustments—minor as they may seem in some cases, major in others—were the bit we were missing. Clearly, it works.

Jack
“Every website I go on now has been ruined by the work I’ve done with CRE, because I look at something and go, ‘That’s useless.’ So that side—understanding people’s behavior and search patterns when they’re on a website—has been really good.

Greg
“It wasn’t just a font; it wasn’t just a color. The changes were driven by what people were actually doing and buying in real time.

Jack
“The best part, I suppose, has been seeing the returns. Obviously I love the income and love to see the railway thriving. But as an engine driver myself:

“There’s nothing better than pulling into one of our stations and there are 200 people waiting, where I know four years ago, before this started, that could easily have been 20.

“So the numbers are speaking for themselves.

Greg
“It’s a great morale booster to all the volunteers who give their time up.

Jack
“Everyone has a real purpose and a real spring in their step because of the work that we’ve been doing with CRE.

Greg
“Would I recommend CRE? Absolutely.

Jack
“I’d recommend Conversion Rate Experts. They’ve been fantastic in helping us turn around the railway, and the service they’ve offered has been fantastic.

Greg
“We’ve more than paid back the investment, and on top of that we’ve got a substantial amount. To me, you can’t say fairer than that.”

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.

Sooner or later, every business encounters the same three words:

You’re too expensive.

How a business responds to this most common of objections is often revealing. Some ignore it, some rely on sales or discount codes, but others—a much rarer group—do something completely different.

They justify their price, using reasons their audience can check.

Vitsœ has been making furniture for more than sixty years, and arguing about its prices in public for many of them. It’s a German-founded company, now manufacturing in Royal Leamington Spa in England, and its main product is a wall-mounted shelving system called the 606.

The system was designed by Dieter Rams in 1960 and has been in production ever since.

A modest 606 setup can cost almost $1,000, but a large one can be ten times as much. In other words, it’s not cheap.

Or is it? Vitsœ’s website makes its case in two linked places, and we’ll move between them as we go. There’s a standalone page called Honest pricing, and there’s the pricing section on the 606 product page itself.

We’re going to take the techniques and tactics in order of what they cost Vitsœ to use. The early ones are free, and they work anywhere. The later ones cost Vitsœ something, and we’ll come to why that’s the point.

Let’s get started.

Explain your prices by naming the mechanisms behind them

You might see Vitsœ’s shelving as expensive, but the company is on a mission to change your mind. Here’s a brief excerpt from the Honest pricing page that explains why the company’s prices are actually less than they might be:

“At Vitsœ we make our own furniture and deliver it directly to you, worldwide. Without middlemen our markup is lower than the industry norm allowing you to receive higher-quality furniture for your money via fair, honest price lists (the only difference between our price lists is the true cost of our administration and packaging to wherever you are in the world)."

Regular Copywriting Friday readers may guess where we are going with this, because it links to the benefits of specificity that we’ve mentioned many times before. As Claude Hopkins said in the 1923 classic, Scientific Advertising:

“Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. They leave no impression whatever."

By contrast, “our markup is lower because there are no middlemen” is a specific reason why prices are lower, not to mention a claim that a customer (or a competitor) could check… which is why it carries more weight.

What explains your price?

So, how do you explain your pricing? To be clear, the answer to this question isn’t why your product is good; it’s why the number is the number. Vitsœ’s answer is structural. We make it ourselves and sell it directly, so you aren’t paying a middleman’s margin.

Yours may well take a similar shape. Our price is what it is because [something about how we operate]. For example:

• We hold stock in three warehouses, so it reaches you tomorrow.
• The person who calls you will be the person who actually did the work.
• We’ll deliver your pizza within thirty minutes.

Can you feel the difference between these and the kind of “high-quality” platitudes that many businesses use?

Once you have your line, ask yourself how easy it would be for a prospect to check. If it’s easy to check—or proven because you show your “three warehouses”—it’s got a much better chance of adding persuasive weight. If not, it risks being ignored as a platitude.

Shrink your prices with comparison and context

If we look at the 606 page itself, we can see how Vitsœ frames the cost of its shelving:

First, the price is broken down into years, then weeks. Then it’s parked next to something the reader already pays for… probably without thinking much about it.

“For example, if your order costs $1,040, over 10 years that’s $104 a year, or $2 a week. That’s less than your streaming service…"

Dividing the number makes it smaller, but naming the comparison helps the visitor visualize exactly how inconsequential that smaller thing is. This is a smart technique, because left alone, the customer might compare that sample order with something else that costs $1,040. A new TV. A month’s rent. A week’s vacation.

But it isn’t that. It’s Netflix.

Immediately beneath this comparison, Vitsœ adds another layer of context to its argument:

“We regularly see 606 components selling on the second-hand market for around the same price as new (or more)."

“This means that, ultimately, 606 costs you less than cheaper alternatives."

What a powerful reframe. Resale value is evidence about durability that doesn’t come from the manufacturer, which makes it worth more than anything the manufacturer could write. By definition, it’s also falsifiable.

Are secondhand components selling online?

Let’s check eBay.

What will your visitors compare your price to?

To state the obvious, they’re going to compare it to something, even if it’s as simple as what they could do with the money instead.

The only question is whether you choose a comparison or they do.

Can you divide your number until it stops sounding like a purchase: per year, per week, per user, per delivery? If you can, might you also name the thing it now resembles?

Beware of lazy comparisons. The phrase “less than a cup of coffee a day” has been overused so heavily that it now reads as a sales technique rather than a fact. Streaming works as a comparison because it’s relatively small, highly valuable, and associated with something good.

And if you can find a number from outside your own company, use that to bolster your argument. We checked eBay in about thirty seconds, and so can your prospect.

Stop training your visitors to wait for the discount

The tactics above are open to anyone. The ones that follow are different, because using them costs Vitsœ money.

That cost is the whole point. Economists call it signaling, and Michael Spence shared a Nobel Prize for explaining how it works, using education as his classic example. Part of what a degree tells an employer has nothing to do with the syllabus. It’s simply easier to earn if you are the kind of person that the employer is looking for.

That gap is the active ingredient. A signal becomes especially persuasive when it would cost a pretender more than it costs you, which is why most marketing promises do so little work. They’re free, so everybody makes them.

By contrast, any policy that costs you real business is one your competitor can’t cheaply copy.

Here’s the very start of the Honest pricing page:

“For many years we have stated that we do not price our products in such a way that we can offer ‘discounts’ against initially inflated prices. And, because our stock does not become obsolete, we never have a ‘sale’."

Again, let’s note that the no-sale policy arrives with a reason attached. Because Vitsœ’s stock does not become obsolete. As a consequence—almost unbelievably in the modern world—the company’s personal planners “actively encourage you to buy less, initially, and only add more later if you need to."

Convincing customers to spend less? That’s the kind of tactic that could only make sense if you’ve been selling the exact same system for decades… isn’t it?

Maybe not. 3D-printer maker Prusa operates in one of manufacturing’s fastest-evolving markets. While many of its competitors follow a ‘fast fashion’ approach, rapidly marketing new machines and orphaning old ones, Prusa’s machines are supported for years. For most of its models, the company sells upgrade kits so customers can buy small and upgrade later if they want to.

The upgrade path is real, not marketing. A Prusa MK3 owner can convert to an MK4S, and an MK4S owner can convert to the newer CORE One. By giving up the traditional upgrade sales, Prusa has built one of the most diehard communities in consumer hardware.

Although Prusa provides upgrade kits for its machines, it isn’t above a back to school sale. Like you, it has a different business model from Vitsœ, but it can use aspects of these strategies that fit. The fact that Vitsœ doesn’t do sales does not necessarily make it braver than everyone else. Its 606 shelving just happens to have removed the usual reasons to discount, and the copy simply tells the truth about that.

In fact, it doesn’t so much tell the truth as drive it home:

“In short, we have already discounted our prices for everyone."

Wait. So the price I’m looking at is the discounted price. That’s another powerful reframe if you can do it, because it makes today’s number the best number, permanently.

What does your discount strategy teach your audience?

So the question isn’t whether to stop discounting. Prusa discounts. It’s what your discounting has already taught people.

Look at your last twelve months of promotions and ask whether a regular customer could predict the next one. If they could, they may already be waiting for it, and reading every price on your site as a provisional offer. That’s the real cost of the permanent discount, and you pay it whether or not you’re running one today.

If you need to discount, the trick is to attach a specific reason to whatever you do. “Our summer sale clears stock before the new range lands in September” is checkable, and it tells the reader exactly when to buy and when there’s no point waiting.

Build trust by giving up things that cost you

Vitsœ doesn’t just encourage people to spend less; it actively resists the tools that other retailers use to get you to part with your money. Here’s where the company explains, again on the Honest pricing page, why it turned down a checkout feature that plenty of high-ticket retailers offer.

“We have investigated offering ‘buy now, pay later’ solutions. To cover the costs of such a service it would be necessary to increase prices for every customer, whether or not they use the service. Our conclusion is that it would not be honest to charge all customers for a service that is not used by everyone. (Of course, we always urge customers to buy less at the outset, safe in the knowledge that we will always be here in the future)."

We’ve highlighted the last part because these aren’t just words on a web page. They are backed up by the fact that Vitsœ’s planners work without commission. These decisions are a cost, and the Honest pricing page ends by emphasizing this:

“While our honest-pricing commitment may cost us business, we are honoured to work with the best architects and specifiers, many of whom have come to respect us for our transparency."

That’s the signal doing its work. The decisions genuinely cost Vitsœ orders and margin, and the costs are what make the claim credible.

What are you already giving up?

Now, you may not be in a position to refuse commission or turn down a checkout feature that converts. Few businesses are.

But here’s the part that really is available to everybody. You are almost certainly already giving something up, and you’ve probably never mentioned it on your website.

Maybe you honor guarantees that are just past their deadline. Maybe you decline leads you aren’t quite right for. What about the cheaper plan that you talk people into, or the upsell you don’t pursue because it isn’t in the customer’s best interest?

Most businesses do at least one of these, and treat it as operational housekeeping rather than as marketing. Spoiler: It’s marketing! In fact, it’s the most credible marketing you own, because it’s the kind of claim that your competitors likely won’t copy.

So here’s the question for your own pricing page. What are you already giving up that you’ve never told anyone about?

Tell us why you are worth it

You may not have Vitsœ’s product, or its business model, or a stock that never goes out of date. Almost nobody does. But the basic tactics it uses are open to anyone.

We love how Vitsœ’s pricing argument fits together like its own system:

• Explaining the mechanism behind its (low) prices.
• Choosing comparisons that reframe the cost.
• Adding resale context that visitors can check in thirty seconds.
• Training its customers that today’s price is the best price.
• Encouraging people to buy only what they need.
• Forgoing financing options and commissions that could increase profits.

As we said at the start, every company encounters the price objection. Not just once, but often. Few have a response as clear and credible as Vitsœ’s.

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.

In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how rewriting one button increased sign-ups by 39%.

Exclaimer makes email signature management software for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Exchange. The company now manages signatures for more than 10 million email accounts worldwide, at organizations including Sony, HP, Cisco, and the BBC.

Research: When the customers tell you what works, take notice

When we asked Exclaimer’s existing customers what actually tipped their decision, one thing came up again and again. It wasn’t the features or the pricing; it was the moment they tried the product for themselves. Here’s one comment that was typical of many.

“I made a trial account and saw how easy it worked. From that moment I was sold and rolled it out for everyone.”

The free trial, which offered all Exclaimer’s features for 14 days without a credit card, was doing a lot of the closing on the website. Based on our principle, when a lever works, pull it again, we naturally looked for ways to get more visitors into that trial.

You don’t need heatmaps to know that content above the fold gets the highest visibility, and Exclaimer’s site already included a button that linked to the free trial.

If we tested new copy on that button, we’d automatically be testing it across the whole website. (In the desktop version, the header with the button appeared at the top of every page.)

The original hero (or control)

Here’s the homepage with the original button. The button reads “Start free trial.”

The tested hero (or variation)

We rewrote the button so that it stated the length of the trial rather than just naming it. The new button read: “Try it free for 14 days.”

Instead of simply naming the offer, the new copy:

• Put the trial’s length in the button. “Try it free for 14 days” tells a visitor what they get and for how long.
• Softened the verb. “Try it” feels like it asks less of a visitor than “Start”—an aspect of the Safe Step Principle.

We could leave the Win Report here, but let’s go a little deeper. Why did those three extra words really matter?

“Start free trial” describes an action, whereas “Try it free for 14 days” describes an offer. The original asks the visitor to do something; the variation gives them something.

And the specificity makes the offer easier to evaluate. Visitors no longer have to wonder how long “free” lasts—and fourteen days is long enough to sound like a meaningful opportunity to put the product through its paces.

Result: Conversions increased by 39%

During the test, we observed a 39% increase in conversions for the trial.

If you’ve been following our Win Report series, it won’t surprise you that a small change in copy can have a significant impact, especially on a high-visibility header CTA. Of course, a button is only as good as the content that sits behind it. In this case, Exclaimer’s trial page offers all the features of the product for the full fourteen days without requiring a credit card. That’s a high-value and low-friction offer… which is exactly what the customers in our initial research were telling us.

By stating the trial length and lowering the perceived commitment, we encouraged more visitors to take up the offer.

This test is a useful reminder that sometimes you don’t need to create a more compelling offer. You need to better communicate the offer you already have.

Here’s what our client had to say

Becky Dunne, Head of Product Lead Growth, Exclaimer, the email signature platform trusted by 80,000+ businesses and 10 million email accounts worldwide.

"We knew our free trial was a strong offer, we just weren't communicating it clearly. Simply rewriting our button to spell out the trial length, with no credit card required, made the offer feel far less risky to visitors. That one change delivered a 39% increase in trial sign-ups, without touching anything else on the page.

"It's a great reminder that sometimes the biggest wins come from clarifying what you already offer, rather than reinventing it."

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 Exclaimer’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.

Thanks to Exclaimer 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!

But how does CRO on Amazon differ from CRO on other websites?

The challenge of growing on Amazon

Amazon can be a tough place to grow. The huge audience of ready-to-buy visitors guarantees competition in every niche, with sellers often pressured from below on price and above on features and finish.

For example, there are currently over 10,000 results for “iPhone cases 17 Pro Max” on Amazon.com. What’s it like to be the 10,000th listing? Or even the 50th? Pretty quiet!

But on the other hand, what would it be like to be highly ranked in a category with lots of traffic? Game-changing, as we know from experience.

User behavior is complex, but when Jungle Scout asked over 1,000 consumers about their Amazon shopping, the reported trend was stark:

• 73% of shoppers click on the top listing in search results.
• 14% of shoppers click on the second listing.
• 5% of shoppers click on the third listing.

This is only what the participants said that they did, but there’s obviously a huge difference between being on page one of an Amazon keyword listing and being at the bottom of page five. In addition to more attention, highly placed listings get more sales, more feedback (via reviews), and faster A/B test results. (As sellers on Amazon know, even high-traffic A/B tests can take 2–3 months to reach completion.)

So your listing placement for relevant keywords makes a huge difference to your ability to grow, but what makes a huge difference to your listing placement?

Less than you might think.

In our guide to unstoppable growth for CEOs and founders, we discussed Noah Lyles’s 100 m win at the 2024 Olympics. (He won by 5 milliseconds.):

The second and less obvious implication of the Olympic 100 m race is this: If you want to be twice as profitable as your competitors, you don’t have to be twice as good as them. You just have to be slightly better.

Is the first-placed entry on an Amazon listing fifty times better than the fiftieth-placed one? Probably not. In a highly competitive marketplace, the aggregation of slight edges in your favor has an outsized impact. The challenge is knowing how to get them.

If you’ve searched for ways to grow your sales on Amazon, you’ll likely have seen the same advice everywhere. Get better images, write punchier bullets, gather more reviews, or lower your prices.

While none of this advice is wrong per se, it’s easy to fall into the spaghetti-against-a-wall trap. Sellers read an article or two, change some things on their listing in line with “best practice,” and cross their fingers. Sometimes the listing position or conversion rate changes. Sometimes it doesn’t. But even if it does, can they really be sure what made the difference… or how the result should impact their sales strategy elsewhere?

Even the sellers who A/B test ideas on Amazon are often just guessing that something might work.

Guessing is never a long-term growth strategy. Our methodology calls for a different approach. The real winners start their work long before they make a change to a listing.

And they follow a tried and tested process.

Why you should always start with research

As we said in Making Websites Win, no sensible person would start taking medication before they’ve been diagnosed with a real and specific problem.

Before you touch anything on your listing, it pays to understand what is actually happening. This is the discipline we call Diagnose → Problem → Solution (DiPS). In essence, you want to:

1. Identify specific problems.
2. Design specific fixes.
3. Build them into a testing plan.

By doing the deep research to diagnose issues before making changes, you can hugely increase your chances of outperforming competitors. To take one simple example, if you can identify the key objections your prospects have about you or your products, you can add counter-objections.

That diagnosis matters more on Amazon than almost anywhere else because your prospects have so many other options to turn to.

Here are some specific areas of research to target, starting with your Amazon funnel.

Amazon funnel research

Start by accessing your traffic-and-sales analytics within Seller Central. You want to focus on three key numbers:

1. How often your product is seen within a visitor search (impressions).
2. How many users go on to see the full listing (sessions).
3. What percentage of those convert (sales).

The gaps between them tell you which issue to address first:

• High impressions but low sessions (a click-through rate under 2%)?

  CTR here is sessions ÷ impressions, and most well-ranked organic listings sit somewhere between 2% and 5%. Anything meaningfully below 2% suggests shoppers are seeing your listing but scrolling past it. To address this, you might (eventually) test a stronger title, better main image, or more competitive price.

• High sessions but low Unit Session Percentage (sales under 8–12%)?

  This is a conversion problem that lives on the listing itself. 8–12% is a typical range across most categories, so anything below that, especially with healthy traffic, points to the page failing to close the sale. Since this means the problem isn’t visibility, you’d (eventually) want to focus on the page content first: images, bullets, reviews, and pricing on the page itself rather than anything at the search-results level.

In addition to these on-platform insights, you can often learn useful things about the previous step in the funnel:

• What are your best sessions telling you? Segment your conversion by traffic source inside Seller Central: organic, sponsored, external. A listing that converts well on branded search but poorly on paid traffic doesn’t have a listing problem; it has a targeting problem. You should (eventually) focus on improving the ad before changing the listing.

We keep saying “eventually” because changing anything at this stage will be going back to guessing. While this funnel research step can provide valuable data within a few minutes, it tells you where in your funnel to focus, not what to focus on.

For that, you need to go deeper.

Voice of the customer research

Knowing what your customers like and dislike about your product is worth its weight in gold for CRO. We call this voice of the customer (VoC) data, and you can capture huge value by asking just five golden questions. Here they are:

1. Where exactly did you first find out about us?
2. What persuaded you to purchase from us?
3. Which other options did you consider before choosing our product?
4. What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us?
5. What was your biggest challenge, frustration, or problem in finding the right product or service online?

While we are sure you can see the value these questions uncover, you might be wondering who to ask.

The ideal answer is what we call qualified non-buyers. These are people who are genuinely in the market for a product like yours, have seen your listing, but didn’t convert. Changing their minds is the fastest way to increase our conversion rate, right?

Well, yes, but there’s a problem.

Qualified non-buyers are hidden inside the much larger group of everyone who didn’t buy. Imagine you sell a stainless-steel dog crate on Amazon. Some of your sessions come from shoppers genuinely comparing crates for a new puppy, but others land on your listing from a broad-match Amazon PPC ad that also serves outdoor dog kennels. If you surveyed the second group, you wouldn’t learn anything useful because they were never in the market for a dog crate in the first place.

So, what’s the next best group that we can easily target?

The answer is customers who almost didn’t convert. When we ask question 4 (What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?), we get as close as possible to understanding our qualified non-buyers. That’s one of the things that makes the voice of the customer research so valuable.

But wait, doesn’t Amazon own all those customer relationships?

Not exactly.

While it’s true that Amazon owns the template, the checkout, and the customer relationship on the platform, it doesn’t own your ability to talk to your audience. You usually have far more VoC data within reach than you might expect. This includes:

• Your website visitors, if you also sell directly. You can engage them on the site itself, or after they make a purchase.
• Your email subscribers, if you have a list, or sell from other online stores.
• Your social media following, which belongs to you rather than to Amazon.
• External discussions on sites like Reddit or Facebook.
• Third-party review sites like Trustpilot.
• Support calls and chats, if your product’s users come directly to you.
• Amazon reviews, which often contain remarkably unfiltered feedback. (Competitor reviews are amazingly useful for the same reason.)

At the top end, you can recruit a carefully screened panel of qualified shoppers who buy within your specific category. That’s what we do for clients, and the panel earns its keep twice—once for gathering VoC feedback, and again for pre-testing ideas before they ever reach Amazon. (More on that below.)

Wherever you find your VoC data, it will help you add problems and hypothesized fixes to your potential testing plan. Nothing is set in stone yet, but if your reviews surface a specific objection, you can prepare a counter-objection and add it to your ideas list. If your reviewers are disappointed in some aspect of your product after it arrives, you can consider whether your copy is overpromising… and add it to your ideas list.

(In some cases, your research will turn up both the objection and the counter-objection that persuaded someone to buy anyway. We call that a double win!)

Method marketing research

Part of our extensive research for every client is trying their product ourselves. This process, method marketing, draws inspiration from actors who immerse themselves deeply in their roles. (The canonical example is Robert De Niro’s stint as a real taxi driver to prep for his role in Martin Scorsese’s movie… Taxi Driver.)

Of course, you can do your own method marketing. When was the last time you purchased your own product on Amazon? How did it compare to competitors in the listings? Was it clear which version you should get? Did it arrive on time and undamaged? What was it like to unpack it, to understand it… or to use it?

Would you honestly recommend the experience to a friend… and if not, why not?

Method marketing your own products delivers tacit knowledge—the kind of understanding that can only be acquired through personal experience—like being a parent or having a hangover. (No matter how well someone describes them, you can only really “get it” by living through them.)

User test your Amazon funnel (and your competitors’)

At its core, user testing involves asking someone to complete a task and capture their thoughts, questions, and experiences as they do.

At CRE, we use a panel of screened participants who closely match our clients’ buyers, but you can start with anyone who has a fresh set of eyes.

1. Set them a relevant task. (For example, find and add my product to your cart.)
2. Record their screen and voice.
3. Have them narrate their thoughts out loud.

A word of warning. User tests can be brutal. We guess that you’ll be surprised (and occasionally dismayed) by what people do and say. Just keep in mind that the harshest feedback is often the most valuable. (That last sentence was proudly sponsored by CRE’s content team… who welcome your feedback below!)

Because you are user testing your real Amazon listing, you can also capture reasons why the specific listing wouldn’t convert. This kind of data isn’t always captured by the general voice of the customer research, so we’ll usually add a version of the “What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us?” question at the end of the test.

If it helps deal with the pain, user testing your competitors’ products can be both useful and deeply cathartic. The more insights you can collect, the better. Just remember to treat your user testers well… they can be just as useful a little later in the process.

Turn your research insights into test ideas

Research doesn’t automatically give you a testing plan. It gives you something more useful: specific problems to solve. The next step is to turn each problem into possible solutions.

This is where a lot of optimization goes wrong. Sellers see that their conversion rate is low, then jump straight to tactics: “Let’s improve the images,” “Let’s shorten the title,” or “Let’s add more benefits to the bullets.”

That’s solution-first thinking—the same guessing we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Instead, take each important finding from your research and ask this question: What would need to change in the shopper’s mind for this problem to disappear?

Let’s say your review research reveals that shoppers repeatedly worry that your laptop stand will wobble when they’re typing. The problem isn’t “our images need improving.” The problem is:

Shoppers aren’t convinced the product will be stable enough.

That objection is a “lock” on your sales. Now you can generate solutions specifically designed to overcome that objection. For example:

• Show the stand supporting a heavy laptop in one of the images.
• Add a close-up showing the construction that makes it stable.
• State the maximum supported weight prominently.
• Add a comparison showing its stability against competing designs.
• Rewrite a bullet to explain why the design doesn’t wobble.
• Add customer evidence of sturdiness to the A+ Content. (The enhanced branded images and text below the listing.)

Notice that these aren’t six random “Amazon best practices.” They’re six possible keys for the same lock, and you can use the same process to generate ideas to address every issue or objection:

• If shoppers don’t understand what makes your product different, make the difference unmistakable.
• If they understand the features but not why they matter, translate the features into benefits.
• If they don’t believe your claims, look for stronger proof.
• If they’re worried about a product’s compatibility, make compatibility impossible to miss.
• If they think you’re expensive, demonstrate why the extra cost is justified.
• If they’re choosing a competitor, identify the criteria on which you can credibly win and make those differences easier to compare.

The important thing is not to stop after coming up with the first plausible solution. A good research insight can generate several competing ideas. Add all of them to your ideas list. At this point you aren’t deciding which one is right—you’ll do that through prioritization and testing.

There’s another useful source of ideas that we mentioned earlier… the things that already persuaded real customers.

When you are analyzing your research data, don’t just record the objections. Look for the answers that successfully overcome them. Your customers may even give you the language to use.

We once did exactly this while selling phones face-to-face. We kept a simple spreadsheet with two columns—the objections customers raised and the counter-objections that proved most effective at overcoming them. Those tried-and-tested responses became our sales copy.

You can do the Amazon equivalent with your research:

Insight → Problem → Counter-objection → Amazon improvement

This is DiPS with an Amazon-shaped final step. For example:

• Insight: “I nearly bought the cheaper one because I couldn’t see why this was worth $20 more.”
• Problem: The reason for the higher price isn’t clear.
• Counter-objection: The extra money buys you a specific benefit that the cheaper alternatives don’t provide.
• Possible Amazon improvements: Demonstrate that benefit in the image stack; quantify it in the first bullet; show a side-by-side comparison in A+ Content.

Do this for the most important findings from your research, and you’ll quickly have more ideas than you can test. And that’s a good problem to have.

The next job is deciding which ideas deserve one of your precious Amazon experiments.

Building your testing plan

Testing sits at the very heart of our methodology. While research brings insights, the ability to scientifically measure the effect of new content over old is the engine of continual growth.

Not to guess that something is better, but to know.

Running experiments is equally important on Amazon, but there are some things to understand before we start. Amazon only lets sellers run one experiment at a time on a listing, and a single test can take eight to twelve weeks to produce a reliable answer. That’s a handful of opportunities a year, which is why it is so important to rank our ideas.

There’s one more factor to address. If your listing genuinely gets low traffic, a statistically valid A/B test may not be practical (or even available) within any reasonable time frame.

If so, don’t worry. Even if a listing has lots of traffic, we often get faster, bigger insights from user testing and A/B usability testing (see below). These techniques rapidly surface the data you need to make major improvements. You can then layer in full A/B testing later when the traffic arrives, or to validate higher-risk changes. (This is exactly the methodology we recommend for low-traffic websites—though it holds up well beyond that context too.)

What you can actually change

Before ranking anything, it’s worth being clear about the levers you can pull on Amazon.

On a traditional website, CRO projects can often go very deep. For example, changing a menu structure or developing a redesign strategy. On Amazon, of course, you have no control over the site’s page design and structure. Instead, you can change the following elements of your listings:

1. The main image and image stack.
2. The product title.
3. The description or bullet points.
4. The A+ Content (the enhanced branded images and text below the listing) and Premium A+ modules.
5. The price and promotions.
6. The volume and recency of your reviews, and how you respond to them.

The good news is that these few elements are where nearly all the persuasion happens. Most of them can be A/B tested inside Manage Your Experiments. Two of them can’t, and we’ll come back to those shortly, because the workaround shapes how you test everything else.

Prioritize your tests to create a ranked list

Step 6 of our methodology is called Creating your experimental strategy. It is just as relevant to Amazon CRO as it is elsewhere, and it explains why the time an A/B test takes to run depends on traffic volume and the size of the change.

It’s a myth that you can transform a business by making “meek tweaks”; extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. We take all of the ideas we’ve generated from the research and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time.

Bold changes give you more profit, and you get quicker, larger returns (it’s a statistics thing). And they’re usually more fun. If you carry out “meek tweaking,” on the other hand, your tests seldom reach significance, you get disheartened, and, most upsettingly of all, you lose the commitment of your colleagues.

After collating all the ideas, we prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

1. How likely is it to double your conversion rate? Asking this question helps to ensure that we’re prioritizing the big opportunities. Bigger, bolder tests are given a higher priority; meek tweaks are demoted.

2. How easy is it to implement the test? We’re looking for the quick wins with the biggest financial impact, so changes that are easy to implement are given a higher priority.

3. Has this idea worked before? Once you’re testing, you’ll quickly start learning what your visitors respond to. Every test we develop is documented so that we can review and prioritize ideas that are inspired by winning tests.

The whole point of ranking your ideas is to ensure that you are testing big, bold ideas that are likely to make the biggest positive difference. Running bold tests matters even more on Amazon because your one experiment per listing can take weeks or months to complete. While it can be tempting to do a quick fix, “meek tweaks” rarely shift the overall conversion rate even when they win.

Your testing plan doesn’t have to be more complicated than a spreadsheet that lists the issues you have discovered, the solutions you have identified, the estimated difficulty of the fixes, and the potential upside. To be clear, these will almost always be rough numbers, but the resulting list can go a long way to prioritizing the most valuable tests.

If you are struggling to decide what to test first, our Amazon CRO team will often start with one of these:

1. Replacing the main image with one built around the single biggest objection. This is the only creative element that appears in search results and the main listing, so it can drive both clicks and conversions.
2. Rewriting the value proposition into the first line of the title and first bullet, rather than leading with a generic descriptor.
3. Upgrading to Premium A+ Content on the highest-traffic listing rather than spreading effort thinly across the whole catalog.
4. Rewriting the entire bullet block around benefits rather than specs, and testing it as a single unit, not one bullet at a time. (Bullets can make a big difference.)

To maximize the chances of getting big wins, we will also cluster multiple changes into one variation. On Amazon, where each answer costs you two to three months, the bigger the change, the quicker the learning.

So let’s say that you have your plan, and your first big test is ready. It’s time to go, right?

Yes, just not in the way that you might think.

Run your first test (but not on Amazon)

The best Amazon optimizers test their ideas before committing to a 2–3‑month test (or longer).

User testing and A/B usability testing

Remember your user testers from the research phase? We said that they’d be useful again. Now is the time to create mockups of your new page and get feedback before you commit to a long-term A/B test.

Taking this a step further, A/B usability testing involves running a closed A/B test, where the “traffic” consists of participants in a usability test. Participants see multiple versions of a page (for example, your existing Amazon page versus your proposed one), choose a favorite, and explain why.

A/B usability testing is particularly useful because it allows you to:

• Get feedback fast.
• Learn specifically why testers like and dislike certain versions.
• Iterate quickly across multiple versions.

Running these panels through four or five iterations of a test can often get you very meaningful insights within a couple of weeks. The results can either validate an A/B test idea before you run it, or give you the confidence to just make the change on low-traffic listings.

The two things Amazon won’t let you test

There’s another good reason to lean on off-platform testing. Two of the most important elements on an Amazon listing have no randomized test on the platform at all.

• Your secondary images. Only your main image is testable under Manage Your Experiments. Your supporting stack, meaning the lifestyle shots, infographics, and comparison charts, has no native randomized test of its own.
• Your price. Despite what some blogs claim, price is not a testable attribute in Manage Your Experiments. And there’s a sound reason for that. As Amazon’s own economist explains it:

“Because we practice nondiscriminatory pricing—all visitors to the Amazon Store at the same time see the same prices for all products—we need to apply experimental treatments to product prices over time, rather than testing different price points simultaneously on different customers.”

Live A/B tests split traffic at the same moment, which is exactly what Amazon won’t do with price. So the only way to test pricing is outside the platform, either through the user testing above or via a service like price optimization analysis.

In both cases, the answer is the same. If Amazon won’t test it for you, take it to a group of shoppers who will. By using this process, you can refine your testing plan into a list of validated ideas to test on Amazon itself.

It’s time to test on Amazon, finally

It may feel like it took a long time to get to actually running an Amazon test, but all the work above gives you the highest likelihood of having a big impact. Assuming that you have the traffic to run an A/B test in reasonable time, two rules govern what happens next:

• You get one test at a time. On your website, you can run as many concurrent A/B tests as you like. On Amazon, it’s one test at a time per product. So if you sell several similar products on the platform, you can run a different test on each. That’s the closest thing to parallel testing that Amazon offers, and if you have a catalog, we recommend it. It’s the fastest way to multiply your learning rate.
• Each test runs until it’s sure. Like any credible A/B testing platform, Amazon runs its experiments to significance. In other words, they’ll keep collecting data until they are confident that the “winner” is not the result of a statistical fluke. Amazon says that results can arrive “as soon as four weeks” on high-traffic listings. Still, in our experience, lower-traffic listings routinely need 8–12 weeks, or even longer, because they gather data so slowly.

Once the test is set up, it’s time to sit back and wait.

And it’s vitally important that you remember to wait—and we mean really wait—for the real result.

The mistake that costs sellers the most

Let’s imagine that you have been through the process above and have ten tests ready in your test plan. You like them. Your usability group likes them. They are ready to go!

The problem, of course, is the waiting… and the temptation to cheat:

Two weeks into an eight-week test, your new page variation is hammering the original. Amazon hasn’t called a winner yet, but numbers don’t lie… Do they? The new version is obviously better… and if you call it a winner now, you can bank the win and move to the next test. Can’t you?

No. Don’t do it. Results fluctuate all the time, but especially in the early days of a test.

This is a classic CRO trap. To make sure that you avoid it:

1. Test to significance with Amazon’s default setting. Testing “to significance” removes the temptation to call a result before the data has settled. If you absolutely must set a custom duration, treat 8–10 weeks as a minimum for anything but your highest-traffic listings.

2. Check the test results after a couple of days to make sure it’s collecting data, then ignore it until it reaches its natural end.

This is why the research is so important. Even if your highest-traffic listing can reach significance in four weeks, you’ve only got twelve testing opportunities per year. If it takes eight to ten weeks, you have far fewer. Unless you sell multiple similar products, you’re testing in sequence, not in parallel.

Likewise, depending on your business, there will be seasons and events that add noise to your data. Black Friday. Prime Day. Christmas. A test that runs through one of these may not be measuring what you think it’s measuring.

If a holiday matters to you, either pause your test or plan around it. Don’t let an eight-to-ten-week window accidentally swallow your biggest sales event of the year.

A brief word on reviews

We can’t complete an Amazon CRO article without touching on the importance of reviews, although mostly we advise caution.

Many Amazon-seller blogs appear to suggest tactics that are explicitly prohibited in Amazon’s own Communication Guidelines. Beware. Sellers who try to incentivize good reviews, channel only their happiest customers into leaving reviews, or use a multitude of other shady tactics risk losing their ability to sell anything to anyone on Amazon.

The best advice we can offer on getting good reviews is also the simplest. Deliver what you promised.

Yes, that’s a long-term strategy, but the good news is that your optimization process will help. As you optimize your listing, you’ll attract more people who will better understand what you are selling, choose to buy, and get what they expected.

There’s nothing to fear in asking for an honest review when you fully and completely deliver on your promises.

Build your Amazon CRO process

This article is about growing your sales on Amazon, but hopefully we’ve helped you see that the highest-leverage work often happens away from the store. This is the part that no competitor or algorithm change can take from you, because it comes down to how well you understand your customer.

Real growth starts with research. Sellers who excel use customer insight to design potential improvements, trial and iterate them rapidly off-platform, push the best and boldest ideas with A/B tests, and let the data decide what goes live.

And then, they do it again and again and again.

Optimizing your Amazon listings is as simple and as hard as that.

Good luck.

If you’d like help building your Amazon research and testing program, book a strategy session with one of our consultants. It’s free, and you’ll come away knowing exactly what we’d test first.

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Traffic is more expensive. Margins are thinner. Competition is relentless. And AI, marketplaces, and aggregators are increasingly intercepting customers before they ever reach you.

Yet some companies are still pulling away—scaling faster, bidding higher, and growing more profitably than everyone else.

In the book, you’ll discover how to:

• Grow despite rising acquisition costs.
• Recover from a drop in organic traffic.
• Compete with larger incumbents or fast-moving newcomers.
• Find the constraints holding back growth.
• Navigate economic, technological, regulatory, or political uncertainty.

We’ve put a huge amount of thought and work into this one—bringing together what we’ve learned about growth from working with hundreds of businesses, and what we believe CEOs and founders need to be thinking about right now. We’re really excited to share it.

The resources aren’t quite ready yet. Right now, we’re collecting preorders and sending out early copies of the book, and we’re putting the finishing touches on the models and supporting materials.

If you sign up for the book’s companion newsletter below, we’ll let you know as soon as the resources are available to download.

Want to run through the models sooner?

In the meantime, if you’d like to run through the models together, we can share them with you early on a call. Book a strategy session to reserve a slot.

As promised, here are the slides from the talk:

Download the slides (PDF)

The talk draws on our new book, The 2027 CEO’s and Founder’s Pocket Guide to Growth. We’re putting the finishing touches on the models and additional resources that accompany it.

If you didn’t pick up a free copy of the book on the day, reserve yours here and we’ll ship one to you as soon as it’s ready.

Sign up for the book’s companion newsletter below, and we’ll send you all the resources as soon as they’re ready.

Want to run through the models sooner?

In the meantime, if you’d like to run through the models together, we can share them with you early on a call. Book a strategy session to reserve a slot.

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.

It’s decent advice (depending on context), but while this idea might sound limiting, it’s actually the opposite. The hardest part of persuasion is conjuring desire out of nowhere. It’s much easier to tap into the wanting that is already there, in everyone, waiting.

If we can do that, our only job is to aim.

In this Copywriting Friday, we’ll see how copywriters have done this across five different ads from three different centuries. We’ll cover how they:

• Choose their emotional lever.
• Aim at a desire that already exists instead of inventing one.
• Stage the benefit so the reader feels it as they read it.

To see what that looks like, we’ll walk through a hundred years of advertising: a heartbroken bridesmaid, a skinny man getting sand kicked in his face, a classic pianist silencing a room, a soap brand that told women they were beautiful, and a search box that fell in love. Five ads across three centuries, aimed at both sexes, pulling opposite emotions.

The belief that great copywriters share

Eugene Schwartz put it as plainly as it can be put. In Breakthrough Advertising, he wrote:

“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product.”

The force that makes an ad work, he argued, comes from the market, not from your keyboard.

So where is that force reliably found? In the sales psychology book Cashvertising, author Drew Eric Whitman set out what he called the Life-Force 8, the eight wants “biologically programmed” into every one of us.

We can’t confirm the biological basis for his claims, but we fully endorse the Life-Force 8 for copywriters who are looking to improve their aim. Here they are:

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages.
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
4. Sexual companionship.
5. Comfortable living conditions.
6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
7. Care and protection of loved ones.
8. Social approval.

Appeals built on these eight, Whitman argues, outsell other human wants because you’re plugging into a current that’s already live. We think of the Life-Force 8 as a map that helps us “go deeper on the benefits.” Now that you have the list, you can look at almost any famous ad and watch it reach for one of the eight.

So let’s do that here, to show you what we mean.

Aiming at a desire that’s already burning

In 1923, The Lambert Company ran a Listerine ad about a woman named Edna. And Edna has a problem. She’s being left behind.

“Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married, or about to be. Yet no one possessed more grace or charm or loveliness than she. And as her birthdays crept towards that tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever. She was often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”

Remember that this is an ad for mouthwash. It could focus on the fact that fresh breath is more pleasant than halitosis, but the copywriter aims for needs that run far deeper. If we were to measure the ad against the Life-Force 8 (that were written down far later), how would it do? We rate it as hitting 3, 4, and 8.

• Freedom from fear (the quiet dread of being left behind).
• Sexual companionship (Edna wants to marry).
• Social approval (her whole set is pairing off while she watches).

Mouthwash is the mechanism for the change, but belonging is the benefit. The campaign was widely credited with turning a minor antiseptic into a household name, with sales rising dramatically over the years that followed.

Now jump two decades and swap the target from a woman to a man. In the Charles Atlas ads that ran in the back of comic books from the 1940s on, readers met Mac, a self-described “97-pound weakling” who gets sand kicked in his face.

Here’s one of the (numerous) variations that the ad ran in over the years.

The ad pulls on many of the same levers as “often a bridesmaid.” Mac, our scrawny weakling, is reaching for freedom from the fear of humiliation, sexual companionship, social approval (see last panel), and being superior. That’s 3, 4, 6, and 8.

Here’s the thing. Nobody had to teach a scrawny boy to want those things. The ad simply names them and points at the product.

Both of these examples pull on fear and shame, but the aim doesn’t have to be dark. In 1926, John Caples wrote one of the most successful mail-order ads ever made, for the U.S. School of Music. It’s so famous that you almost certainly know it:

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play!”

This ad’s story is pure aspiration. A man everyone assumed was a fraud sits down, plays flawlessly, and the room falls silent, then adoring. It aims at the same social approval and superiority as the Atlas ad, minus the bully. The desire is to be admired. The handle is triumph, not dread.

That’s 6 and 8.

Fast-forward almost 80 years. In 2004, Dove and its agency Ogilvy launched the Campaign for Real Beauty. This was built on research suggesting that only a small fraction of women considered themselves beautiful.

While the beauty industry had spent a century selling products through insecurity, Dove decided to aim at the same desire, social approval and self-worth, from the opposite side. Essentially, the message is that you can get 3, 4, and 8 without moulding yourself into what society wants. You are already enough. It is the Listerine desire, but turned inside out.

According to Ad Age, the campaign helped grow Dove sales from $2 billion to $4 billion in three years. As a bonus, you may remember this ad as a viral hit in the early years of the campaign.

Each of these four examples work by aiming at deep desires the audience already had.

So here’s a question for your own copy. Which of the eight primal desires does your product or service actually serve? A backup service isn’t selling storage. It’s selling the protection of loved ones and freedom from fear. A course isn’t selling skills. It’s selling the desire to be superior, to be admired, and perhaps to be more comfortable (better paid) for it.

This is the strategic layer beneath the familiar “benefits, not features” advice. Find the primal current, and you don’t need to push nearly as hard.

Don’t just state a benefit; stage the scene

Aiming at the right desire is only half the job. A desire named is not a desire felt.

A weaker Listerine ad might have said: “Bad breath can hurt your social life. Use Listerine.” True, but forgettable.

Instead, the image and copy built a scene the reader had to stand in. The friends are marrying off one by one. The birthdays “creeping towards that tragic thirty-mark.” Readers of that ad didn’t note a benefit. They watched one slip away from one specific woman, and put themselves in her shoes.

This sense of being there is a close relative of future pacing, the practice of helping users imagine that they already have their desired result. The Atlas ad does it with the final “Hero of the beach” panel. Caples does it with the pianist’s hands hovering over the keys.

The purest modern example of staging the scene is a 2010 Super Bowl ad from Google called “Parisian Love.” There is no voiceover, product shot, or anything that could be reasonably called a sales pitch. The whole ad is a search box, and someone typing into it.

Here are the searches:

• study abroad
• paris france
• cafes near the louvre
• impress a french girl
• long distance relationship advice
• churches in paris
• how to assemble a crib

Nobody tells us that a romance began, that he stayed, that they married, or that a baby is coming. We assemble all of it ourselves, out of search queries, in sixty seconds.

The benefit of Google Search is never stated once. It is staged so completely that stating it would break the spell.

Before we close this section, here’s a simple question to help avoid abstraction and stage better scenes.

Could I point a camera at this?

The phrase “bad breath can hurt your social life” can be written down, but it can’t be filmed. It’s abstract. This is why the image of Edna that the copywriters have conjured works so hard. The reader isn’t just watching Edna. For one moment, the reader is Edna.

Name the thing standing in your customers’ way

Nobody lies awake wanting mouthwash or a correspondence course. So the copy builds a bridge, and it usually does it by naming an enemy.

Listerine popularized a clinical-sounding word most readers had never heard, halitosis, and made it the single thing standing between Edna and everything she wanted. A few years later Lifebuoy pulled the same move with two initials, B.O., running hundreds of tiny comic-strip dramas in which body odor was the hidden reason a romance stalled or a job slipped away. In each case, an ordinary product was recast as the removal of one specific obstacle between the customer and a Life-Force 8 payoff.

What is the “halitosis” in your market? The unnamed thing standing between your customer and what they most want. Name it, honestly, and your product becomes the key that removes it.

The wanting was always there

Of course, Edna wasn’t real. Mac wasn’t real. But the desires those ads borrowed, to belong, to be admired, to keep the people we love safe, have been real in humans for thousands of years, and they aren’t going anywhere.

That’s the whole strategy. You don’t create the wanting. You find it, you aim at it honestly, and you stage its payoff so vividly your reader feels it before they’ve decided to buy.

Do that, and your product stops being a thing on a shelf. It becomes the one item standing between your customer and a desire that’s older than advertising 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.

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.

This Win Report is a deeper look at a test we touched on in our case study: How a website redesign delivered the best year ever for Churnet Valley Railway.

Research: Seeing a competitive gap

Following early redesign wins on the client’s homepage, we turned our attention to other high-traffic pages. In addition to the standard train rides, the railway offers popular dining experiences like the Breakfast Train or the Sunday Lunch Train. Like the railway itself, the dining trains were wildly popular with people who’d experienced them, but far less convincing to first-time bookers on the website.

When our Research Team asks non-converting visitors why they didn’t buy, the top reason is almost always price—usually a sign of an underlying issue with the value proposition. Churnet Valley Railway’s visitors, however, gave an unusual response.

23% of the respondents told us they were “researching options,” which is often a polite way of saying the site hadn’t convinced them to make a decision. If you’ve read our case study for Churnet Valley Railway, you’ll also know that the company had competitors whose websites felt “modern,” “fresh,” and “family friendly.”

Aside from research and price, understanding availability and journey dates was a key concern that competitors also handled better. Although we had addressed that issue for general train rides on the homepage, it made sense to apply the work we’d done there to one of the dining pages.

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original page for the Breakfast Train. The booking button took visitors directly to another website to research dates, the food menu felt workmanlike, and the images felt disconnected from the main content.

The tested page (or variation)

We rebuilt the Breakfast Train product page using some of the design elements created for the previous win, and added some new features.

The full redesign included:

• “Live” calendar and key information: The top of the new page included the price, the standard departure time (10:30am from Froghall), the next available date, and a calendar that visibly marks sold-out and no-service dates. We also added the Trustpilot review widget immediately below the first section.
• Photography that better sells the experience: A single, close-up shot of the breakfast replaces the old collage banner, with additional food photography next to the main description.
• A detailed menu with clear dietary marks: Every dish is given a description, a photograph, and a visible dietary indicator.
• A drink menu: Previously absent. Now its own section, with wines by the bottle or glass, local craft beers, ales, prosecco, and sodas.
• A “What’s Included” checklist: Useful for visitors to see what they’ll get… and useful for the railway to build up the value included for the £28.50 ticket.
• Clearer paths to the booking step: Anchor-tab navigation under the hero (About | Menu | Drinks | What’s Included | FAQ | Check Running Times), and the green Check Running Times & Book Tickets button repeated in the hero, after What’s Included, and again before the FAQ block. (Leading with check running times is a good example of The Safe Step Principle at work.)

And here’s the mobile version:

Result: Ticket sales increased by 10%

During the test, we observed a 10% increase in Breakfast Train bookings.

By creating a more modern design and highlighting the practical information at the top of the page, we increased the page’s cognitive fluency—the principle that information which is easier to process is also easier to trust and act on. The purchase funnel was back on the rails.

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 Churnet Valley Railway’s business and then to other clients. The template proved portable enough that we ran the same play on a second dining product page soon after—with an even bigger result.

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 Churnet Valley Railway 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!

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.

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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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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

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 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!