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.

DiamondBack Covers manufactures premium, American-made aluminum truck bed covers. Known for their rugged, lockable designs, they sell direct-to-consumer and have a loyal following among truck owners who need serious protection for their gear.

Research: Is it secure truck covers or outdoor adventures?

When we asked real customers the main reason why they bought and valued DiamondBack Covers, one answer overwhelmed all the others. Security.

Security, it turned out, was also front and center in the headline on the homepage:

Keep your gear secure & dry on whatever wild adventure you dream up.

The headline sat superimposed above a beautiful video that showcased those same adventures, including campfires, sand dunes, and mountain trails. The video was beautifully shot. In fact, it was so well done that some visitors were confused about what the company was selling.

During our user testing, participants said:

“A lot of this content on this video is confusing to me in the context of you’re just selling covers. Is it outdoor adventures or is it truck covers?”

“Perhaps the homepage video showcases more covers and less outdoor activities.”

Even though the existing headline highlighted security, the video led with adventure. Not only was that message distracting, it also pushed more relevant content off the screen for some users.

How could we better match the video’s “cover story” to the value proposition that real customers cared about most?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original page, including a lifestyle video of camping, off-roading, and outdoor adventures.

And here’s the video that played behind that headline (without the copy):

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s the tested page, including a new headline, subhead, and video.

Here’s everything we added:

• A benefit-led headline: “The most secure, storm-proof folding bed cover ever built.”
• A direct supporting line: “Tested and proven in extreme conditions.”
• A solid background to the “Shop Truck Covers” CTA to improve legibility.
• A product-focused hero video to visibly demonstrate the cover’s security, weatherproofing, and durability.

Working with the team at DiamondBack Covers, we repurposed clips from elsewhere on the site to support the benefit-led hero video. Here it is (without the copy):

In addition, the mobile version of the page featured its own video:

Result: Conversions increased by 26%

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

Bringing the product’s real strengths above the fold gave buyers what they’d already told us they came for, and they responded.

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

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 DiamondBack Covers’ 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 DiamondBack Covers 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 operates one of the largest online travel marketplaces in its region, connecting visitors with tours, activities, flights, hotels, and vacation packages. Millions of travelers use the platform each year to plan trips to one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. The client has asked to remain anonymous.

Research: When a “helpful” widget became too much of a good thing

Product pages are where high-stakes purchases live or die. For a vacation—something visitors are often excited and stressed about in equal measure—every piece of information on the page is doing a job. The question is, how much of that job should be done at once?

During our user testing for this client, we kept seeing the same behavior. Participants stalled on the product page. In particular, they were constantly checking back and forth between the main page content and the booking widget on the right-hand side. The widget was meant to act as a useful trip summary, but in practice it divided and disrupted the participants’ attention.

This is a classic cognitive load problem. Pile up too much information at once and a visitor’s decision-making slows or stops entirely, especially if that decision has big consequences. Fortunately, a fix for cognitive overload is well-established: Progressive disclosure. Reveal information in layers, and let visitors pull on the thread when they’re ready for more.

How could we keep the widget’s usefulness while letting visitors move through the page one comfortable step at a time?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of the original product page. The content stretched much further, but you can see the start of it and the booking widget on the right-hand side.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s a mockup of the simplified variation we tested. The widget still exists, but we’ve transformed it into a compact, collapsible summary.

Here are the key things we changed about the widget:

• Collapsed by default: Instead of expanding all details at once, the widget now shows four collapsible sections—Travel Details, Transfer, Hotels, and Tours. Each one is visible only when the visitor chooses to open it.
• Section edit links: Each section title includes a clear edit button, allowing visitors to adjust their selections without hunting through the page.
• Inline navigation: Clicking any section in the widget scrolls the visitor to the corresponding content within the main page, turning the sidebar into a navigation aid.

Result: Conversions increased by 41%

During the test, we observed a 41% increase in conversions.

When visitors had more space to think, they could focus more on the decision itself. Reducing cognitive overload, it turned out, helped a lot more people reach their final destination.

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!

For some companies, it triggers a flurry of panicked activity… more content, more SEO, more ad spend. For others, it creates a kind of paralysis. If traffic is falling despite doing “all the right things,” what’s left to try?

Traffic is falling (and this time it’s not coming back)

Over the past two years, many of our clients have experienced something genuinely unsettling. Traffic is falling—not temporarily, but structurally.

AI answers, zero-click search results, and platform-controlled discovery mean customers increasingly get what they need without ever visiting a website. We work with companies whose organic visits are down 20%, 30%, even 40%.

Before you decide how to respond, it’s worth taking a step back and asking an important question. Why?

How to tell if AI is the culprit

Traffic can fall for many reasons—updated algorithms, technical issues, seasonality, or new competitors entering the space. But AI-driven drops tend to leave distinct fingerprints that are easy to spot.

The more of these you’re seeing, the more likely it is that zero-click search is behind it:

• Information queries are down, but branded search is more stable. AI systems tend to intercept research queries, not navigational ones.
• “Direct” traffic is increasing as a share of your mix. AI tools often strip referral data, meaning more visits appear as direct.
• Conversion rate is rising, despite traffic falling. Casual browsers and early-stage researchers get answered by the AI, and those who make it to the site tend to be further down the decision path.
• AI platforms are starting to appear in attribution reports. More analytics platforms are now surfacing AI referrals and UTM data from tools like ChatGPT.
• Customer surveys increasingly mention AI tools as the discovery source. When you ask “How did you hear about us?”, more customers are answering with platforms like ChatGPT.

What most companies do next

When traffic drops, most companies instinctively try to get it back:

• They invest more in SEO.
• They produce more content.
• They increase paid acquisition.
• They test new channels.

All of these can help, but they share a common limitation—they operate in an environment where costs are rising and control is limited. In other words, the return on investment of these activities is uncertain, and therefore, inherently risky.

But step back, and the real problem becomes clear. It’s not lost traffic, it’s lost growth.

Traffic was simply the mechanism used to deliver that growth, and when it fails, the instinct is to repair it.

Conversion rate optimization offers a faster, more predictable path to recovering that growth, without relying on platforms or waiting for traffic to return.

And in the era of AI-mediated search, its benefits extend further than most companies have yet appreciated.

Lost traffic, lost growth

Imagine a mid-sized e-commerce business that’s healthy and growing at the start of 2024:

Traffic had been rising by around 20% per year. If that had continued, the start of 2026 would look like this:

Instead, zero-click search has taken a 30% bite out of traffic. The remaining visitors are more qualified, so the conversion rate has nudged up, but not enough to offset a significant fall in sales:

The good news is that sales haven’t fallen 30% since 2024, they’ve fallen 16%. The bad news is that instead of the 2,880 customers the business expected, it’s getting 1,680. That’s a panic-inducing gap of 1,200 customers every single month, growing larger with every passing quarter.

The predictable response—more ad spend, more SEO effort, new acquisition channels—addresses that gap from the top of the funnel, where control is limited and costs are rising. But there’s a better lever.

The one variable you have the most control over

Revenue is determined by three variables:

Traffic is increasingly controlled by platforms and algorithms. Customer lifetime value is meaningful but slower to influence. Conversion rate is typically the variable you can influence most… And crucially, it determines how much value you extract from every visitor who reaches your site.

In our example, if the conversion rate improves from 2.40% to 3.50%:

Most of the gap closed—without a single additional visitor, without bidding against anyone, and without waiting for an algorithm to change.

At 4.00%:

Almost exactly where it was forecast to be based on its 2024 growth trajectory.

The traffic hasn’t returned. The growth has.

Why so many companies are solving the wrong problem

For years, buying traffic was easy. Organic search rewarded content volume. Paid channels scaled predictably. And because more traffic reliably produced more sales, most businesses never developed the habit of asking a harder question: how much value are we actually generating from the visitors we already have?

The result? A strategy and pattern of investment that is becoming increasingly indefensible.

Later has arrived. The companies pulling ahead right now are the ones that have elevated CRO to a leadership-level priority, not a line item.

CRO doesn’t just close the gap; it widens your lead

As we explore in our Power Law of CRO series, improving your conversion rate has compounding effects that extend well beyond simply converting more of your current visitors. It:

• Increases profit per visitor.
• Improves return on ad spend (often dramatically).
• Raises your allowable acquisition cost, meaning you can outbid competitors for the paid traffic that now matters more.
• Unlocks previously unprofitable marketing channels.

In other words, CRO doesn’t just close the gap created by falling traffic. It makes you more competitive in every channel you use to replace that traffic.

And there’s one more effect that’s quieter than the others, but increasingly important.

The AI opportunity most businesses haven’t spotted yet

There’s a secondary effect that very few businesses have considered. When an AI platform decides which businesses to surface and recommend, it is making a judgement about quality, clarity, and authority. It is asking, in effect, does this business clearly explain what it does, who it’s for, and why it’s credible?

CRO doesn’t just improve how your site converts the visitors who arrive. It improves your chances of being the business that gets recommended in the first place.

The traffic trap

For years, digital growth followed a spend more to get more traffic playbook. But as platforms hoard more and more attention, that strategy becomes fragile and expensive.

As a result, conversion rate—long treated as secondary to volume—is an increasingly decisive competitive advantage.

If your traffic is falling, the question to ask isn’t “how do we get more?”… it’s “are we truly confident that we have optimized the traffic we have?”

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.

Direct response copywriters have always relentlessly tested their copy. In the past, unique coupon codes, PO boxes, and phone numbers allowed writers to measure the success of different headlines, CTAs, prices, and more.

The web, of course, takes that practice to the next level.

Amazon tests everything. When we look at the page above, we know that every headline, bullet point, and image has earned its place in real transactions with real buyers. Let’s walk through what the copy is doing, and how you can borrow every one of these techniques.

Five techniques (and how you can use them)

1. Emotional and algorithmic appeals

The most visually dominant message at the top of the page isn’t about doorbells at all.

Stay in the know on the go.

The headline is about staying connected to what matters at home, wherever you are.

The best copy doesn’t introduce new ideas to the reader—it enters the conversation that’s already happening in their head. Homeowners who need a video doorbell are already thinking about stolen packages, someone calling while they are at work, or not knowing who’s at the door. Stay in the know on the go meets that conversation exactly where it is.

And that emotional message is paired with the product’s full listing title:

Ring Battery Doorbell, Home or business security with Head-to-Toe video, Live View with Two-Way Talk, and Motion Detection & Alerts, 2-pack, Satin Nickel

Amazon’s search engine—like Google’s—rewards titles that contain the words people type. This is written for the algorithm, and for shoppers who already know what they need. But even within the title, notice that the features use benefit-inflected language wherever possible. Not “180-degree vertical field of view” but “Head-to-Toe video.” Not “passive infrared sensor” but “Motion Detection & Alerts.”

Both headlines are looking to create an emotional yes—to make the right person feel understood before they’ve read a single word of explanation.

How could you use this? What’s the conversation your prospect is already having with themselves before they find your product? Not just the features they’ll appreciate once they own it—the worry, the desire, the half-formed hope that’s already there.

This approach follows the jobs to be done framework. People don’t buy products; they “hire” them to make progress in their lives. The job a video doorbell gets hired for isn’t “monitor the front door”—it’s something more like “stop worrying about parcels sitting outside my door.” The closer your copy gets to the actual job your product is hired to do, the less work the reader (and search algorithm) has to do to recognize its relevance.

2. Every subhead pulls double duty

The Ring page isn’t just built for one type of reader. Some people will read it top to bottom. Most won’t.

Any long page must accommodate what we explored in our analysis of the classic Ogilvy travel ad. In this dual-track reading behavior, some visitors read every word and others scan only the signposts. The Ring page solves this elegantly because every section subhead is a complete benefit statement.

Here’s a list of all the subheads:

• Know what’s up—and down. (Head-to-toe vision).
• Stay connected to who’s there.
• DIY install.
• Easy charging. Complete control from the Ring app.
• See more. Know more. Protect more.
• Works with Alexa.

That’s a full sales pitch, compressed into under 40 words that a scanner can absorb in under ten seconds. For readers who slow down, each subhead introduces body copy and visuals that deepen the case. The subheads serve both groups simultaneously, without sacrificing anything for either.

How could you use this? Run the “subheads only” test on your own pages. If you read just the section headers—nothing else—do they make a coherent, compelling argument for your product? If they don’t, your scanners are leaving unconvinced.

3. Two objections neutralized in four words

The installation section deserves its own study. Two sentences. Four words. Two big objections pre-empted. DIY install. Easy charging.

Every potential buyer of a smart home device has the same anxieties: Is this going to be a pain to install? and What happens when the battery dies? The copy doesn’t wait for those objections to crystallize in the reader’s mind. It answers them upfront, before the questions are even asked.

This is the Objection/Counter-Objection (O/CO) approach that sits within step 3 of our methodology—identifying the concerns that kill purchases and neutralizing them as early as possible on the page. The Ring page does it in a subhead.

Notice also what the copy doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “simple installation,” which is vague and could mean anything. “DIY” is specific and carries a particular meaning. You can do this yourself today. That specificity is doing work that a softer phrase couldn’t.

How could you use this? List the two or three objections your customers typically have before they buy. Now ask: where does your copy address them? If the answer is “buried in the FAQs” or “in the third paragraph,” you have a clear opportunity to bring those answers forward. Earlier is better.

(If you need a way to gather customer objections, read our article on the five golden questions.)

4. The “slippery slide” to make installation feel simple

Below the “DIY install. Easy charging.” subhead, the copy reduces the entire installation process to three verbs: Connect. Mount. Recharge.

Joe Sugarman described this kind of approach as the “slippery slide”—the idea that every element of copy should keep the reader moving forward rather than giving them a reason to pause. A complicated installation section is the opposite of a slippery slide. Three simple verbs feel frictionless.

Contrast this with how the same information might have been written as a paragraph:

First, download the Ring app and connect the device to your home Wi-Fi network. Then, mount the doorbell to your door frame using the included installation kit. Finally, recharge the battery via USB cable when the indicator light shows low power.

That’s accurate, but reading it feels like work.

The three-verb version isn’t hiding information; it’s making a promise. This is the kind of thing you can do. The rest of the page delivers on that promise with visuals and step-by-step detail. But the first impression is one of lightness.

How could you use this? Where are you making something feel more complicated than it is? Every additional step, every caveat, every “but first you’ll need to” adds perceived friction. What can you collapse or eliminate without losing meaning?

5. Different types of proof for different types of skepticism

The Ring page includes piles of proof, but it doesn’t deliver it all in one place. It distributes it deliberately across the entire experience.

At the top: star ratings and review counts—social proof, immediately visible to any visitor.

As we’ve seen before, the benefits sections includes app interface screenshots (demonstration proof) showing you exactly what the experience looks like.

Then the “Works with Alexa” section—borrowed authority from one of the biggest brands in consumer technology.

There’s even a technical details table (which we’ll save you from here) that provides the exact specs and capabilities for buyers who need them.

Can you see how each type of proof speaks to a different kind of skepticism?

• Star ratings reassure first-time buyers who are on the fence.
• App screenshots reassure people who want to know what the experience will actually feel like.
• The Alexa integration reassures people who worry about compatibility with what they already own.
• Technical specs reassure geeks (like us at CRE) who go deep into the details.

Our ultimate guide to proof identifies seven types of persuasive proof elements—and the Ring page uses at least five of them, spaced across the page so the reader encounters fresh reassurance at each scroll depth. Skepticism never gets time to build.

How could you use this? You probably have proof of your own—testimonials, data, guarantees, demonstrations—but where does it appear?

If it’s all concentrated at the bottom of the page, you’re asking readers to make most of the journey unconvinced. Ensure that you spread proof across the experience so there’s always a reason to keep believing.

The lab that never closes

Here’s what makes the Ring Amazon page worth your time: it isn’t the work of one copywriter’s best instincts. It’s the accumulated result of real experiments run against real buyers, where sales is the only metric that matters. When copy performs in that environment, it’s not a fluke.

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.

DiamondBack Covers manufactures premium, American-made aluminum truck bed covers. Known for their rugged, lockable designs, they sell direct-to-consumer and have a loyal following among truck owners who need serious protection for their gear.

Research: The question that the homepage didn’t answer

When we user tested the DiamondBack Covers website with real truck owners, one question surfaced before testers had even scrolled down the homepage. In fact, we heard the same thing from nearly every participant:

“Will these covers fit my truck?”

This is a classic example of the power of user testing, because it’s the kind of question that only surfaces when you talk to real users who don’t know what you know. Everyone at DiamondBack Covers knew that their products were available for every truck. They even included this banner on key pages of the website. (See the engagement in this heatmap view.)

As we say in step 5 of our methodology, Spotting the hidden wealth in your business:

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.

For DiamondBack Covers, the truck compatibility banner was one such asset. Its absence from the homepage, one of the site’s most visited pages, added an extra layer of friction for visitors who might already be concerned about prices or shipping lead times.

What would happen if we added the asset to the homepage, right where first-time visitors were asking the question?

The original homepage (or control)

Here’s the original homepage hero section, featuring a lifestyle video and a “Shop Truck Covers” CTA. Although the page continued below, there was no mention of truck compatibility.

The tested page (or variation)

Given that the existing “Available for every truck” bar had gotten good engagement on subpages, we added it to the homepage immediately beneath the hero video.

In addition to the text heading, the bar showed the logos for Ford, Chevrolet, RAM, GMC, Toyota, Nissan, Jeep, and Honda.

Result: Conversions increased by 18%

During the test, we observed an 18% increase in conversions.

We didn’t create anything new; we just took reassurance that worked elsewhere and put it where our research told us it was needed.

This is a pattern we’ve seen across many Win Reports and is a good example of using both quantitative and qualitative research to create a hypothesis. In this case, quantitative analytics showed the homepage was important (which isn’t always the case), and qualitative user testing revealed a question.

And when the research tells you what questions are on your visitors’ minds, it’s always worth testing an answer.

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 DiamondBack Covers’ 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 DiamondBack Covers for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

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.

In 1946, America’s commercial airlines were booming. Railroads, which had dominated long-distance travel for decades, suddenly found themselves positioned as slow and old fashioned. In response to the challenge, Southern Pacific Railroad published the ad we are analyzing today, “A short course in Railroading… for Airline executives.”

It may not look like a modern-day ad, but it’s a treasure trove of techniques for anyone in a competitive market.

While the ad is addressed to airline executives, its true audience is everyone else. And now, eighty years later, we still get to learn from the ways that Southern Pacific’s copywriters used to attack the problem.

Let’s look at what makes it work, and how you can use these techniques for your own business.

Five techniques that you can use

1. Address your competitors to reach your audience

The ad’s headline begins with misdirection:

A short course in Railroading… for Airline executives

Of course the ad isn’t for airline executives at all. It’s for the traveling public—business travelers, families, anyone deciding between a train ticket and a plane ticket.

So why not just say that?

By addressing airline executives, Southern Pacific accomplishes two things at once:

• It positions the railroad as the travel authority. The word “course” implies the airlines need educating. Southern Pacific is the teacher. The power dynamic is established before the reader finishes the headline.
• It flatters the real reader. If you’re a regular traveler reading this ad, you feel like you’re eavesdropping on an insider conversation. You’re getting access to information the airlines don’t want you to know.

Gary Bencivenga, widely regarded as one of the greatest living copywriters, talked about the importance of calling out your audience in the very first line. This headline calls out two audiences simultaneously—the stated one (airline executives who need an education) and the real one (travelers, who feel like insiders).

How could you use this? Think about who your competitors are talking to, and consider addressing them directly. A project management tool might write “A quick guide to productivity—for spreadsheet lovers.” A boutique hotel might write “What the big chains don’t tell their guests.” You’re not really talking to the competitor’s customers. You’re talking to your prospects, and making them feel like they’re getting the real story.

2. Kill them with kindness (and then with facts)

Watch how the ad opens:

Airline executives are mighty proud of their airlines and we don’t blame them. The airlines have been progressive and they have their place in the transportation scheme of things, just as the railroads have theirs.

This is generous. Warm, even. The reader’s guard drops immediately. This doesn’t read like a competitor on the attack; it reads like a reasonable person being fair.

Then comes the pivot:

But we wish they wouldn’t spend so much time talking about the railroads in their advertising. They seem to know so many things about railroad service that aren’t so!

And a few lines later:

We don’t like to mention a competing service in our advertising but now we’re rather forced to talk about the airlines in order to inform the airlines (and the public, too) about some of the facts of the railroad business.

This approach works because although people instinctively resist being sold to, they welcome being informed. Copywriting legend Joe Sugarman called this the difference between pushing a product and pulling the reader in. By framing the ad as a reluctant correction—“we’d rather not, but someone has to set the record straight,” Southern Pacific transforms a competitive attack into an act of public service. And as we explored in our article on persuading skeptical people, replacing emotional language with hard facts is exactly how you win over an audience that doesn’t want to be sold to.

How could you use this? If you need to position against a competitor, start by genuinely acknowledging what they do well. Then introduce the specific area where they fall short, not as an attack, but as a correction. Here’s a basic template:

“[Competitor] is ideal for small teams. But once you’re scaling, the differences become significant—here’s what they look like.”

The lesson is that the concession makes the critique more credible.

3. Reframe the comparison (and expose the hidden costs)

The airlines had been running ads comparing their fares to railroad fares and claiming air travel was cheaper. Southern Pacific doesn’t just dispute this, it reframes the entire comparison.

First, the one-way vs. round-trip reframe:

… they always compare the one way fares. Since airlines make no reductions on round trips for travel in this country, the airline people apparently think the railroads don’t, either. As a matter of fact, railroads make substantial reductions for round trip tickets. We figure most people have to get home sometime.

That last sentence—“We figure most people have to get home sometime”—is a lovely piece of writing. It’s funny, it’s common sense, and it makes the airlines look like they have something to hide.

Then the apples-to-oranges reframe:

The airlines, in comparing fares, always add in the cost of a Pullman lower berth. A comparison of a seat in a plane and a berth on the train is the same as comparing a chair with a bed.

And later, on the hidden costs:

The airlines forget to add in the bus fares to and from the airports (and bus travel time as well). Also they overlook their limited baggage allowances, which increase air travel cost with a normal amount of luggage.

This works because it doesn’t rely on opinion. It simply changes the frame of reference—and once you see the comparison the right way, the airlines’ claims start to strain under their own logic.

We’ve seen this principle at work many times. Often, the winning move isn’t to argue harder within your competitor’s frame, it’s to change the frame entirely. If your competitor is winning the “cheapest” argument, shift the conversation to total cost of ownership. If they’re winning on features, shift to outcomes.

How could you use this? Look at how your competitors frame their comparisons. Are they cherry-picking metrics? Comparing apples to oranges? Ignoring hidden costs or trade-offs? Don’t just counter their claims, reframe the comparison so the reader sees the full picture.

4. Let the numbers do the fighting

In the center of the ad sits a simple fare comparison table:

There’s no spin here. The table is just the numbers, side by side.

This is one of the most reliable principles in copywriting: specifics are more persuasive than generalities. As Gary Bencivenga put it, never make your claim bigger than your proof. Southern Pacific doesn’t say they’re cheaper. They show you exactly how much cheaper, on specific routes, in both coach and first class.

Notice too that the table includes first class railroad fares—which are still dramatically cheaper than the airline’s standard fare. The reader doesn’t have to do any mental math.

We wrote an entire guide to how proof works in persuasion, and this ad is a textbook example. When your proof is this strong, you don’t need to editorialize. You just present it and let the reader draw the obvious conclusion.

How could you use this? Wherever possible, replace claims with data. Don’t say “we’re more affordable,” show a side-by-side comparison. Don’t say that your customers get faster results, show the median time to value.

And when you make a comparison, make it easy to scan. Tables, charts, and side-by-side layouts do the heavy lifting so your visitors don’t have to.

5. Concede your competitor’s real advantage (and watch your credibility soar)

We’ve touched on this in technique 2, but it’s worth emphasizing again here because of what the copywriter does near the end of the ad:

We accept the fact that airplanes have one primary advantage—speed. But we think trains have a lot of advantages, too, including economy and plenty of room to move around.

By the time the reader reaches this line, Southern Pacific has spent the entire ad proving the airlines wrong on fares, on comfort, on baggage, on family travel, on total cost. The reader might be thinking: Okay, but planes are obviously faster.

And then the ad says it for them.

This does two things. First, it eliminates the reader’s main objection as a reason to dismiss everything they’ve just read. Second, and more importantly, it makes every other claim in the ad more believable. If Southern Pacific were just shilling, they’d never admit the airlines have any advantage. The fact that they do without hedging tells the reader something important: These people are honest. I can trust the rest of what they’re saying.

Sixteen years later, Copywriter Paula Green would turn this principle into one of advertising’s most famous campaigns: “Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.”

That campaign worked for exactly the same reason as the Southern Pacific ad does… admitting a weakness makes everything else you say more believable. Concede the ground you can’t win, and you fortify every position you hold.

How could you use this? Identify your competitor’s genuine, undeniable advantage and say it out loud.

Yes, [Competitor] is faster to set up. That’s because we spend the first week configuring the system to your exact workflow, so you don’t spend the next year working around a generic setup.

Concession isn’t a weakness. It’s often the foundation for your strongest argument.

The art of the velvet glove

What makes this ad remarkable isn’t just the individual techniques, it’s the tone. Southern Pacific demolishes every one of the airlines’ claims, and they do it while sounding reasonable, generous, and faintly amused. There’s no chest-thumping, just a calm, fact-filled correction from someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about.

The ad is signed by Claude E. Peterson, Vice-President, System Passenger Traffic. It’s not a faceless corporation speaking—it’s a named individual, putting his reputation behind every claim. That personal touch adds a final layer of credibility.

If you’re in a competitive market, and who isn’t, the instinct is usually to either ignore your competitors entirely or attack them head-on. This ad shows the third option: to be so generous, so specific, and so transparently honest that your audience makes the case for you.

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

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To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capability to “get stuff done.” This article describes a framework for speeding up your testing—so you can grow your profits quicker.

Many small changes or one big one?

If you’ve read our Win Report, A year’s worth of PPC leads in just three weeks, you may recall that our winning landing page was very different from (and much more effective than) the control:

You might wonder whether we arrived at the final winning version via a series of smaller A/B tests, or whether we had simply tested the new page against the old one.

We had done the latter.

But we wouldn’t always do that.

How much should you incorporate into each A/B test? At one extreme, you could test every pixel change. At the other extreme, you could throw your whole year’s worth of ideas into one test. The ideal lies somewhere in between. But where? Here are some of the issues that our consultants consider when deciding how many changes to include in a single A/B test. These points should help you to decide which approach is best for you.

(Note that this question applies to multivariate tests as well as to A/B/n tests. In both cases, you’re faced with the question of how much to change in each page element.)

Why people do—and don’t—run tests

First, consider the following chart, which shows the main reasons why people do—and don’t—run A/B tests:

The reason to run an A/B test (represented by the green arrow) is to learn how a particular change affects conversion.

However, there are two drawbacks (represented by the grey arrows): (i) each test costs money and takes time to implement, and (ii) each test takes time to run.

In practice, each forthcoming test can feel like a departing bus. Ideally, you would put each change onto its own bus. However, buses may not come as often as you’d like, so it can be wise to squeeze in several changes, rather than waiting for the next one to come along. In the bus analogy, the grey arrows represent the cost of each bus. The green arrow represents how important it is for each change to have its own bus.

When should you give each change its own A/B test?

You may want to A/B test every small change if:

• The green arrow is long: In other words, you have a strong desire to learn how each change affects conversion, maybe for one of the following reasons:
  • Because the change is expensive. For example, if you’re about to offer a bold guarantee, if you’re changing the price, or if you’re about to start giving away a premium (a free gift), you need to know how successful the change is, so you can work out if it’s cost-effective.
  • Because the stakes are high. For example, you may be planning to implement this particular change on other sites, on other pages, or in other media (e.g., in offline advertising), so a bad decision would be costly.
  • You’re testing changes that you aren’t confident will be effective, so you need to rely on an A/B test to tell you whether the changes are effective. This is fair enough. Most marketers are overconfident in their ability to spot a winner. A/B testing brings them down to earth with a bump.
• The upper, grey arrow is short: The time and cost of implementing a test is low.
• The lower, grey arrow is short: The time for a test to reach significance is low, perhaps because (i) the page gets a lot of traffic, so tests reach significance quickly, (ii) because you are testing changes that greatly outperform the control.

When should you include many changes in a single A/B test?

You may prefer to include many changes in one A/B test if:

• The green arrow is short. In other words, you’re okay not knowing how each individual change affects conversion.
  • This may be because you’re testing many changes, and you’d be happy as long as the overall conversion rate increases.
  • Or it may be because you’re highly confident that your changes will be effective. For example, you may be fixing things that are broken, or you’ve run A/B usability tests on them (see example).
• The grey arrows are long. This can be for several reasons. For example, because
  • It takes you a lot of time and effort to get a test implemented. This can happen if (i) your workflows for creating content are inefficient, (ii) your company’s approval process is bureaucratic. Sometimes, “corporate brand police,” regulatory bodies, and IT departments feel like goalkeepers who were put there to stop you from scoring, (iii) your development resources are inadequate, or (iv) your software and technology is poor or poorly integrated. Clients often ask us to help them improve these aspects of their business, aware that it makes so much difference to their overall success.
  • Your changes are intertwined, so it would be fiddly or impossible to separate them into separate tests or to run them as a multivariate test.
  • The page has few visitors, so a small improvement would take months to be detected (i.e., reach statistical significance). Multivariate testing (MVT) allows you to overcome this problem by carrying out several A/B tests simultaneously on the same page. However, it usually takes more work to set up a multivariate test than a straightforward A/B/n test.
  • You have an abundance of good, research-driven ideas to test, and implementation has become the bottleneck. There’s simply not enough time to implement and run each idea as a separate A/B test. Also, this has an opportunity cost: While a profitable idea sits on your to-do list, you effectively lose money every day until it’s implemented.

How to use these insights to grow your business faster

• Consider whether you might progress faster by including more—or fewer—changes into each test.
• Try to identify the bottleneck in your testing process—then remove it. For example,
  • If you’re short of good test ideas, find ways of generating more of them. (This article and this one should help.)
  • If you’re limited by the rate at which you can design and implement tests, look for ways of speeding things up. You probably find that certain types of tests are easier to implement than others. In particular, avoid tests that require new page layouts, complex code changes, or upstream approval.
  • If your page doesn’t have enough traffic, look for ways of getting more. For example, if you have many landing pages, consider whether you’d benefit by sending more traffic to one page, on which you can then run much quicker A/B tests.

The bottom line

The right answer to “how many changes per test?” isn’t fixed—it shifts depending on your traffic, your implementation costs, your confidence in the changes, and how much you need to understand why something worked, not just that it did.

What stays constant is this: the goal is to learn and implement as fast as possible. That means regularly asking yourself where the friction actually is. Is it a shortage of ideas? Slow development cycles? A bureaucratic approval chain? Low traffic forcing you to wait months for significance? Each bottleneck calls for a different fix—and until you identify the right one, you risk solving the wrong problem efficiently.

The companies that grow fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleverest test ideas. They’re the ones who’ve built a machine for turning ideas into live tests, and live tests into decisions. Optimise that machine, and everything else speeds up with it.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

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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 fast-growing B2B SaaS company operating in the enterprise security space, with recognition from Gartner, Forrester, and G2, and a customer base that includes some of the world’s leading organisations. Their product is technical, high-stakes, and requires serious research before purchase—which means their blog plays a critical role in the buying journey.

Research: The traffic wasn’t the problem. The dead end was.

The client had invested heavily in content. Their blog attracted substantial organic traffic from IT leaders, security professionals, and procurement teams searching for answers to exactly the kinds of questions their product solves:

• How do organisations manage access across hundreds of SaaS applications?
• What are the risks of ungoverned software sprawl?
• How do compliance requirements affect identity and access management?
• What should enterprises look for when evaluating solutions in this space?

These weren’t casual browsers. They were senior decision-makers, actively researching a problem the client was uniquely positioned to solve. The content was doing its job—educating, building trust, and positioning the company as an authority in a complex market.

Then it stopped. And with it, the momentum. Visitors who’d arrived with a genuine business problem, read carefully, and were perhaps on the verge of taking the next step—were handed nothing. No prompt, no pathway, no invitation to go further. Just a footer and a faint sense of ‘what now?'

Heatmaps and behavioral analysis confirmed what we suspected: a classic “dead end” problem. Visitors would reach the bottom of an article and bounce—not because they weren’t interested, but because the website gave them no obvious reason to stay.

In B2B, where the sales cycle is long and trust is everything, this is a particularly costly mistake. Every lost reader represents not just a missed click, but a missed opportunity to move a high-value prospect one step closer to a conversation.

This is a surprisingly common pattern. Content teams work hard to attract qualified traffic; UX teams work hard to turn browsers into buyers. But the handoff between the two—the moment a reader finishes an article and looks up wondering “what now?”—is often left entirely to chance.

Not for long.

The original page (or control)

Blog articles ended abruptly. The final paragraph gave way to a footer. There was no bridge between “I’ve just read something useful” and “I’d like to find out more”—let alone “I’d like to speak to someone.”

The tested page (or variation)

We added a single section at the end of each blog article: “What you should do next…”

It sounds almost too simple. But the details mattered.

The section was designed to feel like a natural continuation of the article, not a bolt-on promotion. It matched the visual style of the content around it. And crucially, it addressed visitors at different stages of the buying journey—offering a next step that felt appropriate whether they were ready to commit or simply wanted to stay connected.

The three options were:

• Subscribe to our newsletter—for those who wanted to keep learning without any commitment.
• Join a weekly group demo—for those curious enough to see the product in action, but not yet ready for a sales conversation.
• Schedule a personalized demo—for those ready to have a direct conversation.

Each option met the visitor where they were. The section didn’t push. It guided—a logical safe step.

Results: Conversions increased by 43%

During the test, we observed a 43% increase in leads from blog traffic. Visitors who had previously read and left were now exploring the site—and requesting demos.

But this only tells half the story. The traffic already existed—paid for in time, effort, and years of SEO work. Adding a pathway to the product didn’t cost a penny. It simply unlocked value that was already sitting there, effectively creating a new stream of customers from traffic the business already owned.

In enterprise SaaS, where the cost of acquiring a qualified lead can run into hundreds or thousands of dollars, that’s a significant commercial shift—achieved with a single, well-placed section.

The lesson: these visitors didn’t need to be sold harder. They just needed to know what to do next.

This isn’t a one-off—it’s a pattern

This test came from our Wins Database—a proprietary library of proven tests built up over nearly two decades of CRO work across hundreds of clients.

We’ve encountered the dead end problem across a wide range of clients and industries. The details change; the fixes—and the results—rarely do. Here are a few similar wins using this pattern:

• A global wealth and lifestyle advisory firm serving high-net-worth clients saw a 54% increase in conversions from blog traffic.
• A B2B SaaS platform for meeting management saw a 129% increase in newsletter sign-ups from blog traffic.
• An online flooring retailer saw a 46% increase in transactions from blog traffic.
• A specialist nutrition brand saw 43% more orders from blog traffic.
• A behavioural science and product psychology website saw a 100% increase in course downloads from blog traffic.
• A premium health supplement brand saw a 171% increase in transactions from blog traffic.
• A conservation project that lets customers purchase plots of land in protected nature reserves saw a 104% increase in conversions from blog traffic.

Could this work for you?

If your business publishes content—blog posts, guides, articles, resource pages—there’s a reasonable chance you’re sitting on the same opportunity. The test is straightforward: find pages that get meaningful traffic but leave readers with nowhere to go, and add logical next steps. No redesign, no lengthy development cycle. Just a clear pathway from content to conversion.

And finally, can you guess what’s coming next….

What’s next

We added this version of 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.

Optibac is the UK and Ireland’s most recommended brand of probiotic supplements. They have also been recognized with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, the UK’s highest award for business.

Research: Driving down uncertainty and doubling down on previous wins

Our Research Department discovered that site visitors were sometimes uncertain about which product was right for them. They said things like:

“I don’t feel as if there is any concrete information telling me what I should be using and why.”

When we conducted user tests, participants often zoomed into the side of the product images to focus on the dosing information on the label.

These findings implied that clearer information and signposting would improve conversion, and earlier Optibac tests had confirmed this. In particular, we had seen success by adding more information to the product pages.

Leveraging past wins is a critical part of our CRE Methodology™. Here’s what we say in Step 6:

“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.”

This time, we wanted to double down on the previous wins to see whether more informative product titles would also boost conversion.

The original page (or control)

We ran the test on one of Optibac’s most popular products, their Every Day supplement. Here’s the top of the original page:

The tested pages (or variations)

As the page gets so much traffic, we decided to test two variations against the control.

(When there is sufficient traffic to a page, testing multiple variations can accelerate understanding of what works and help tune ideas for future tests. You can see a similar approach in our Win Report, How a “sticky” call to action increased sales by 25%.)

Here are the two variations we tested. Only the titles change.

1. Variation 1: “Every Day 30 Capsules | 1 month supply”
   The title contextualizes the supply and how often customers need to buy. This was a small change based on the research observation that users lingered over supply and dosing information.

2. Variation 2: “Every Day | Scientifically Proven to Increase Natural Gut Bacteria | Daily Digestive Supplement | 30 capsules | 1 month supply”
   This title added much more information about what the product does and who it is for (including supply details). Formatted with pipes.

It was a close race, but one of them beat the control by 23%. Can you tell which?

Result: Variation 1 increased conversion by 23%

Although each variation beat the control, Variation 1—with its emphasis on dosing and supply—won overall. During the test, we observed a 23% increase in conversion rate and a 34% increase in revenue.

This is a great example of a test that both resulted from previous wins AND triggered further wins. In subsequent tests, we added supply information wherever there was a product title, and won again.

We add every successful test to our proprietary Wins Database, then look for ways to apply the lessons 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 (again) to Optibac for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic team to work with).

A few words from Soraya Janmohamed, co‑founder of Optibac

Thanks to Optibac 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!

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.

You could talk about your “rigorous testing,” your “high-quality materials,” or your “satisfied customers.” But in a world where every competitor is making the same claims, those words often fall on deaf ears. They’ve become “wallpaper copy”—text that people see but don’t actually process.

The ad we’re looking at today, a 1981 masterpiece from Nikon—and part of a wider, iconic campaign—avoids the “we are reliable” trap by using a high-stakes association that is impossible to ignore.

Here is the ad:

Four persuasion techniques behind why this ad works

If you break the ad down, you’ll find four persuasion techniques—each doing a specific job, and together creating something far more convincing than any single claim could.

1. Let someone else make your biggest claim

The headline is a masterclass in high-stakes positioning:

In 1981, the Space Shuttle was the pinnacle of human engineering. Everyone knew that space flight was a world based on redundancy—everything had a backup, and those backups had backups. By positioning Nikon as the deliberate exception, the ad isn’t saying the camera is “good.” It’s saying it is beyond question.

This is proof by absence. The lack of a backup doesn’t just imply reliability—it demonstrates it. And crucially, Nikon doesn’t make that argument directly. NASA’s standards make it for them. The authority of the space programme is transferred wholesale to the camera in your local shop. This is a classic application of Authority Bias, the psychological tendency to respect and trust the judgment of experts and institutions.

That’s the move worth studying: Nikon didn’t borrow NASA’s logo. They borrowed NASA’s judgment. The question for your own product is the same: who is the most demanding user you have, and are you telling that story? An expert or world-class organisation relying on your product for their hardest problems is worth more than any claim you could make about yourself.

2. Use specificity as a credibility signal

The image pulls you in—an astronaut’s gloved hands holding the camera. It creates intrigue and draws the eye. But it’s the copy that does the heavy lifting, grounding that curiosity with specific, credible proof.

Notice the date: 1971. Not “for years” or “for decades”—a specific year. Vague claims feel like marketing; specific facts feel like history. If you can swap a generalisation in your own copy for a date, a number, or a named client, do it.

Then comes the footnote at the bottom of the ad:

At first, you might think it would be best to omit the word “modified,” but by volunteering that limitation, they make every other claim feel more trustworthy.

Readers sense—consciously or not—that a brand willing to disclose the small stuff probably isn’t lying about the big stuff. It’s a principle worth applying to your own proof points: a minor qualification, honestly stated, often makes the surrounding claims land harder.

3. Always connect it back to the reader

Marketers often focus on impressive extremes. But unless you clearly show what that means for the reader, the message stays abstract—an impressive story about someone else.

Nikon does this in a single move:

The logic is elegant: if it works without a backup on a Space Shuttle, it will certainly handle whatever you’re shooting. The extreme case becomes a guarantee for the everyday one. It’s a step that’s easy to skip—ads often open with authority and forget to land the plane.

Once you’ve proven your product can handle the impossible, you still need to explicitly connect that to your reader’s daily reality. They won’t always make the leap themselves.

4. Sell the outcome, not the object

The tagline lands the whole thing:

Not “we make the world’s greatest cameras.” The result, not the product. By the time you reach that line, it doesn’t feel like a boast—it feels like a logical conclusion. Worth asking of your own tagline: are you describing what you sell, or what the customer gets?

A final thought

Most companies try to prove reliability with words. Nikon proves it with context.

Instead of saying “trust us,” they place their product inside a world where trust is non-negotiable—and let that world do the talking. The principles at work here aren’t unique to cameras or space travel. Borrowed authority, proof by absence, strategic honesty—each one is available to any business willing to look for the right context to put them in.

And in case you’re wondering, NASA still trusts Nikon for its photographic requirements, including on the Artemis II lunar flyby—the farthest any human has travelled from Earth.

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 operates one of the largest online travel marketplaces in its region, connecting visitors with tours, activities, flights, hotels, and vacation packages. Millions of travelers use the platform each year to plan trips to one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. The client has asked to remain anonymous.

Research: Bridging the intention‑action gap

When visitors arrived on our client’s website, they were often in a browsing mindset—exploring, dreaming, and gathering ideas. In the travel industry (and many others), this “inspiration phase” is a high‑traffic but low‑conversion zone.

The gap between liking the idea of a trip and actually booking one can be surprisingly wide. The difference is what behavioral scientists call an intention‑action gap (or value‑action gap). These occur when a person has a goal but fails to take the necessary first step.

For companies like our client, these gaps were often caused by:

• Choice paralysis: The sheer volume of travel options creates a “freeze” response.
• Temporal discounting: The brain prioritizes the comfort of the present (browsing) over the effort of real planning.

The desire is there, but without a nudge toward the present, visitors drift into a “later” that never arrives. The question was, how hard would a “nudge” have to be to make a real difference?

The original page (or control)

Here’s the client’s homepage. with the search widget featuring a standard “Search” button.

The tested page (or variation)

We made a single one‑word change to the tested page. Can you see it?

Yes, that’s it. The label on the search button changed from “Search” to “Search Now.”

Nothing else changed.

Result: Bookings increased by 38%

During the test, we observed a 38% increase in bookings.

But why?

If you’ve read our article on the Safe Step Principle, you might wonder: doesn’t adding “Now” risk the same problem we warned about with “Buy Now” buttons?

The Safe Step Principle shows that pushy CTAs backfire when they demand more commitment than the visitor is ready to give—“Buy Now” on a category page asks visitors to leap past their readiness. However, “Search Now” is fundamentally different for three reasons:

• Low friction: Searching is the safest possible step. It costs nothing, commits to nothing, and carries no risk.
• Temporal prompting: Adding “Now” doesn’t increase the commitment; it simply injects a sense of the present tense into an action the visitor already intended to take.
• Directivity: Research suggests that specific, directive language reduces cognitive load. “Search” is a label; “Search Now” is an instruction.

The change worked because it didn’t ask visitors to do anything different; it simply reminded them that the time to act was the present.

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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 operates a large online marketplace for tours, activities, and vacation packages, connecting travelers with curated experiences across one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.

Research: Readers who never became buyers

The client’s site includes a huge library of detailed travel articles—guides to natural wonders, regional itineraries, and seasonal travel tips. These pages attract enormous organic traffic, but our analytics review revealed that many of these visitors never transferred to the main booking funnel.

In effect, the visitors were treating the website like a high-quality travel magazine. Lots of research, relatively little booking.

As other tests for this client showed, the stunning content and imagery created a genuine emotional response in their visitors. How could we build on those “wow” moments to bring more people into the main booking funnel?

The original page (or control)

Here’s a mockup of one of the original article pages. The real site was filled with high quality, engaging content written by genuine experts and led by stunning imagery and video.

The tested page (or variation)

For the test, we added an exit-intent lightbox that appeared automatically when a visitor’s cursor moved toward the browser’s close or back button. (If you want to test something similar on touch devices, you can trigger the lightbox a few seconds before the average visitor leaves the page.)

The content of the lightbox was informed by test wins we’d had on the site’s homepage, allowing us to reuse:

• A proven headline and subhead: The lightbox featured copy that had already won on the homepage, reminding visitors that everything they needed for their trip was in one place and subject to a best-price guarantee.
• Signposts to the most popular activities: We pulled the “Top things to do” image tiles from the homepage, giving visitors a set of ice-breakers—specific, clickable starting points rather than a blank search field.

And finally, the lightbox added:

• A single, inviting call to action: The “Build my dream trip” button provided a safe next step that felt like the beginning of an adventure.

Result: Conversions increased by 82%

During the test, we observed an 82% increase in conversions.

This result proved that many of the “magazine” visitors were interested in booking—they just needed a well-timed nudge before they drifted away. The exit-intent lightbox was an efficient way to deliver that nudge because we didn’t need to change any article content. And we didn’t need to guess what would resonate because we could repurpose copy and content that had already won elsewhere. (If you’ve followed our past Win Reports, you may recognize this as a pattern.)

The previous win had done much of the heavy lifting. This test simply inserted a proven message into a new and valuable context.

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

On the face of it, neither state appears well-suited to running an effective CRO program, and yet, the pressure to beat (or even meet) previous sales numbers is uniquely intense. Failure in the peak season is not an option.

When we spoke to one seasonable business, they summed up the challenge well:

“Christmas makes or breaks the whole year for us. I’m always nervous until I see the sales figures.”

The low traffic paradox

When traffic and cash flow fall, seasonal businesses face a subtle psychological trap. On one hand, resources for investment feel scarce. On the other, working on conversion rate can feel impossible when you have little or no traffic. The benefits to the bottom line feel too hard to get and too far away.

Psychologists call this present bias—our tendency to favor actions that produce immediate results over those whose rewards arrive later.

Practically, it means that some seasonal businesses focus on things that feel productive during low season but may deliver little real value (new campaigns, designs, or partnerships), while others enter a hibernation period. Neither helps much when the next peak season arrives, and both paths come at the expense of activity that will bring far more growth later on.

In fact, the low season is the best time to start your CRO program. You have the time and space to think strategically and do the research and testing that will pay off later. That way, when the peak season comes, your improvements can scale across thousands or millions of visitors.

In this article, we show the strategies that successful seasonal businesses use to beat the low traffic paradox—and how you can apply them too. We’ve helped many of these businesses achieve record-breaking growth. One client said it led to their “busiest month in history.”

Let’s look at the strategies that underpin those results.

Your seasonal CRO strategy

For the purposes of this article, we’ll divide the strategies into low season and peak season. Low season is for research and A/B usability testing; peak season delivers the traffic that enables standard A/B testing.

Low season

Low season is characterized by low (or lower) traffic. While this can make it hard to run standard A/B tests, there are plenty of high-value activities you can pursue.

Gather objections and points of persuasion

At a fundamental level, it’s incredibly useful to understand five high-leverage things about your visitors, whatever the season:

1. How they found you.
2. What appeals to them about your brand, products, or services.
3. How they view you in comparison to others.
4. What puts them off your products or services.
5. Their biggest frustration in finding the right product or service.

Use the low season to ask existing customers these questions, and you’ll often learn extraordinarily valuable things. To find out more, see our article: Five golden questions that reveal exactly why your visitors aren’t converting.

During the low season, you can also benefit from the following techniques which can be carried out even if your website gets just a few visitors per day:

• User test your website. Not only do user tests require no website traffic, they are by far the fastest and most effective way of finding the blocked arteries that limit conversion rates and profits. This technique alone has helped us make hundreds of millions for our clients. That’s why we run them constantly.

• Ask customers that bought during peak season what nearly stopped them from buying. This is a great way to come up with ideas to convert more of your prospects.

• Speak to your salespeople (what we call “Voice-Of-Customer Aggregators”): People who sell your products or services “face-to-face” are often a goldmine of questions, objections, and counterobjections that you can use to improve your website. Who was manning the phones during peak season? Who was handling phone support?

• Analyze competitors’ websites. If you don’t have any obvious competitors, look at successful companies in adjacent fields. For example, if you sell snow blowers, you could look at lawnmowers. If you run a beach front hotel, look at ski resorts. Your low season is someone’s peak season. What are they doing?

• Add your phone number to the top of every page (and make it clickable). Even if you have no plans to encourage phone calls on an ongoing basis, speaking to the customers who call in low season can surface questions and objections you can use to improve the website.

Build your experiment list

If you apply some of the techniques above, you’ll inevitably gather numerous insights for potential ways to improve, but how do you choose what to work on first?

In our methodology, we recommend ranking your ideas list as follows:

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.

Ranking this way helps you prioritize the experiments that are most likely to bring the biggest business benefits. The goal is to build a ranked list of experiments with strong hypotheses that you can systematically work through.

Ideally, this is a list that you would maintain all year round, creating a continuous pipeline of experiments to run.

Test in the low season with A/B usability tests

While standard A/B tests require high volumes of traffic, A/B usability tests allow you to test at any time of the year. Instead of using website visitors, you recruit a small panel of customers or potential customers, and ask them for feedback on the two versions of the page—the original and your challenger—to see which they prefer and why.

A/B usability testing is also particularly useful if you want to:

• Test bold ideas that you’d be nervous about putting on the live website.
• Get fast feedback and iterate quickly.
• Validate ideas that you may want to test when the peak season traffic arrives.

The biggest advantage of A/B usability testing is that it shows not only the option that might win, but also the reasons why it might win—something that you don’t get from standard A/B testing. Here’s a case study of A/B usability testing in practice. It’s not a seasonal business, but you can see how we used A/B usability testing to quickly improve a low-traffic website.

Peak season

The work you’ve already done pays dividends as things get busier, providing a streamlined queue of high-leverage tests. As peak season approaches, traffic rises to the point where you can now conduct standard A/B tests to validate or disprove your ideas. The key to doing this effectively is the preparation and test design you’ve already done:

• Execute your queue of experiments, starting with the low-risk, high-reward tests that you created in your low season.

• Iterate quickly and bank your winners while the traffic and conversions are there.

• Test any bold ideas you validated through A/B usability testing.

Peak season is also prime time for data captured through analytics, exit surveys, and email follow-up sequences. To take just one example, it can be especially useful to ask your customers what almost stopped them buying from you. The answer to this question allowed us to raise one seasonal client’s conversion rate by 16% (with just one test).

Gathering data now ensures that you’ll have plenty of fuel for your next low-season cycle of research and idea generation.

A note on testing during peak season

Some teams get nervous about A/B testing during peak periods and choose to pause it. That feels safe—but it’s actually the opposite.

A/B testing is low risk by design. You don’t roll out big changes blindly, you test them. And when you have high-traffic, you can further lower your risk by testing on a smaller proportion of your visitors. Losers are quickly discarded, and winners are scaled. So as long as you’re testing, you’re improving.

Peak season makes this even more powerful. With higher traffic, your tests reach their conclusion faster, so you can find and apply winning ideas more quickly.

The real risk isn’t testing. It’s standing still when the upside is highest.

Are you ready for your peak season?

By now, you’ve seen the truth that successful seasonal businesses already recognize: CRO is a continual process, not a seasonal one.

Between the overwhelm of peak season and the paradox of low traffic, teams rarely give themselves enough time. Without the runway required to do proper research, build strong hypotheses, or get A/B tests ready, they default to the behaviour they should avoid: guessing, rushing, and making changes based on opinion rather than evidence.

There’s an enormous opportunity cost to waiting until things get urgent, but for seasonal businesses that optimize continually, the rewards can be immense.

Seasonal CRO in action

Finally, to demonstrate the practical value of these techniques, here are a few Win Reports we’ve published for seasonal businesses.

+16%

Win Report: How trust signals turned suspicion into 16% more signups

How addressing key customer objections—trust and payment flexibility—helped increase signups by 16%, using targeted research and simple on-page messaging to turn scepticism into action.

+36%

Win Report: How removing content increased conversions by 36%

Removing a poorly performing top section from iFLY’s birthday page revealed more engaging, benefit-led content—leading to a 36% increase in conversions and a 47% boost in revenue per customer.

+26%

Win Report: How becoming the customer helped us increase conversions by 26%

A simple messaging change, inspired by first-hand customer experience, replaced a confusing “free shipping” claim with credible social proof—resulting in a 26% uplift in conversions and a 31% increase in revenue.

+12%

Win Report: How research‑inspired bullets grew conversions by 12%

How customer research reshaped product page bullets to emphasise conservation, social proof, and perceived value—driving a 12% uplift in conversions and a 27% increase in revenue.

+103%

Win Report: How an appeal to emotion doubled conversions

A travel booking platform doubled conversions by replacing a form-heavy homepage with inspiring visuals and a simplified search. The test highlights how engaging visitors emotionally before asking for input can significantly boost results.

+5%

Win Report: Less hero, more party (and 5% more sign-ups)

Small, strategic changes to the top of Party Hard Travel’s pages—reducing the hero image, surfacing trust signals, and improving navigation—helped more visitors see key content, resulting in a 5% increase in signups.

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.

How do you sell a product that almost everyone considers the “wrong” choice?

In 1992, Apple had roughly 12% of the personal computer market. The other 88% ran MS-DOS or Windows on IBM-compatible hardware. If you were a business traveler shopping for a notebook computer, the safe, expected choice was a PC.

So when Apple’s agency sat down to sell the PowerBook, they faced a challenge that many businesses face today: how do you persuade people to switch from the dominant option to yours, when the dominant option has all the momentum?

Their answer was a four-page print ad that’s a masterclass in persuasion and competitive framing (full-size version here). Let’s look at why it works.

Page 1: The headline frames the entire decision

The first page of the ad contains nothing but a single sentence in enormous type:

If you’re looking for a notebook computer that’s easy to use, there are basically only two ways you can go.

There’s a surprising amount happening here, so let’s break it down. First, that opening clause:

“If you’re looking for a notebook computer that’s easy to use…”

This does the job Gary Bencivenga named calling out a hot audience. It filters for laptop shoppers. But it also slips in an assumption: that ease of use is the criterion you should be shopping on. Not speed, not price, not compatibility with what the rest of your office uses. Ease of use. Before you’ve even turned the page, Apple has defined the criteria it believes it can win on.

“… there are basically only two ways you can go.”

This is an intentionally false dichotomy, albeit delivered with a straight face.

In 1992, there were numerous notebook manufacturers. But the ad collapses the entire market into a binary choice: the hard way, and the easy way. It’s a framing technique sometimes called “the crossroads.” Another influential copywriter, Clayton Makepeace, wrote about how powerful it is to present prospects with exactly two paths and make one of them obviously better.

Feel how the word “basically” is doing quiet work here, too. It makes the claim feel like common sense rather than a marketing assertion. Basically, there are two ways. You almost nod along before you realize you’ve accepted the premise.

How you could use this

If your product competes in a crowded market, consider whether you can reframe the decision as a simple binary. Not “here are 15 options to evaluate,” but “there are really two approaches, and here’s the difference.” This works especially well when you’re the challenger brand, and you want to be compared directly with the dominant category. What two paths could you present to your prospects?

Page 2: “The hard way” uses the competition to sell Apple’s product

Turn the page and you see one of the most effective competitive comparison pages we’ve come across.

The headline is simply “The hard way.” Below it, the page is deliberately cluttered. Accessories, adapters, floppy disks, a bulky clip-on trackball, memory chips, and a thick instruction manual are scattered around a generic beige laptop. Each item has a price tag and a short explanation of why you’ll need it.

This is proof through demonstration—one of the most persuasive forms of evidence. The ad doesn’t just claim that PC notebooks are complicated. It shows you the mess. Every object on the page is another argument, and the visual chaos reinforces the feeling: this is a hassle.

Notice also how the copy handles the price comparison. The base price of the “ordinary notebook” is $2,497. But the real cost is much higher once you add the memory ($210), trackball ($172), programs ($506), modem ($142), and the others. The ad doesn’t add these up for you—it doesn’t need to. Your brain is already doing math. Letting the reader draw their own conclusion is almost always more persuasive than stating it for them.

Then there are the costs that don’t have dollar amounts:

“Your time, name your price.”

“Comfort is something most notebook computer ads never talk about.”

See how the copy expands the comparison beyond money to the things people actually care about when they’re working on a long flight or in a hotel room. (The 1992 laptop market was entirely about business use.)

How you could use this

If your competitor’s product requires extra accessories, add-ons, integration work, or learning time that yours doesn’t, consider making this visible.

Don’t just say “we’re simpler.” Show the full cost—in money, time, and frustration—of the alternative. As we’ve discussed in our ultimate guide to proof, specificity is one of the most powerful forms of credibility. This ad is specific about every dollar and every inconvenience.

Page 3: “The easy way” uses the same structure to opposite effect

Now, let’s turn to page three.

Where “The hard way” was a visual mess, “The easy way” is calm, clean, and spacious.

One laptop. No clutter. Many of the callouts begin with the words “Built-in”—built-in networking, built-in fax/data modem, built-in file sharing, built-in peripheral support. The repetition is deliberate. Each “built-in” is a small hammer blow reinforcing the same message: you don’t need to buy anything else.

The visual contrast between pages two and three is doing most of the persuasion work. You don’t need to read every word of copy to get the point—the feeling of each page tells the story. Page two feels stressful. Page three feels easy. That emotional response is faster and more powerful than any rational argument.

This is the show, don’t tell principle taken to its logical extreme. The ad never says “the PowerBook is simpler.” It doesn’t need to, because the design has already made you experience the simplicity.

There’s a lesson here about how clear value propositions work: the best ones don’t just describe benefits—they make the benefits obvious through structure, layout, and contrast.

How you could use this

Think about how the design of your marketing reinforces (or contradicts) your message. If you’re claiming ease-of-use but your landing page is a mess, the visitor’s emotional experience will read “complicated” no matter what your headline says.

Could you create a visual contrast between the messy “before” and the clean “after” of using your product or service?

Page 4: The comparison tables let the reader prove it to themselves

On its final page, the copywriter is highlighting a different but just as effective aspect of Hard versus Easy… the laptop in use.

Six everyday tasks are presented in side-by-side comparison tables. For each task, “The hard way” lists between 5 and 11 steps. “The easy way” lists between 1 and 3.

The effect is almost comical to modern readers. To add a pointing device the hard way, you need nine steps, including “Attach appropriate clamp arms” and “Adjust tilt angle.” The easy way? “The trackball is built in.”

Apple isn’t making any specific claims here. They don’t need to. The tables simply present the options and let the reader’s own judgment do the rest. By the time the reader has scanned all six tables, they’ve personally verified (again) the ad’s central argument.

This is exactly what we mean when we talk about the importance of demonstrating how something works rather than just claiming it does. A claim can be ignored. A demonstration has to be reckoned with.

How you could use this

Where can you let visitors prove your claims themselves? A side-by-side comparison, an interactive calculator, a “before and after” workflow—anything that invites the prospect to verify rather than just believe. The key is specificity: this ad doesn’t compare in vague terms; it compares step by step.

What specific task could you walk through to show how much easier, faster, or better your approach is?

A closing line that reframes the entire category

The ad ends with a tagline at the bottom of page four:

Macintosh. The more you do, the easier it gets.

This is a quietly ambitious line. It’s not just selling the PowerBook—it’s reframing the entire experience of owning a computer. The implicit contrast is with DOS and Windows, where the more you tried to do, the more complicated things became (anyone who lived through DOS path statements and CONFIG.SYS will feel this in their bones).

But the line also serves a forward-looking purpose: it’s addressing the anxiety of switching platforms. If you’re a PC user considering a Mac for the first time, one of your biggest fears is the learning curve. This tagline says: Don’t worry. It only gets easier from here. That’s objection handling disguised as a tagline, and it works because it feels optimistic rather than defensive.

How you could use this

Your closing line or tagline doesn’t have to be a summary of features. It can reframe the prospect’s relationship with the entire category. What anxiety does your prospect carry about switching to you—and can you address it with a single, confident statement?

If you’re doing it the hard way

This ad was created at a moment when Apple was the underdog. They couldn’t win on market share, software compatibility, or corporate purchasing policies. So instead of competing on those terms, they chose the fight they could win—ease of use—and then made the case so visually and specifically that it was almost impossible to argue with.

If your company is doing it the hard way—competing against bigger or more established alternatives—perhaps the strategy Apple used can work for you. Maybe you don’t have to win every argument. You just have to pick the right argument and put it to work.

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.

FanTokens.com is the official partner of elite teams like Juventus, AC Milan, FC Barcelona, and Arsenal, and sells tokens for fans to trade. The tokens give fans voting rights and numerous rewards, while also being tradable assets.

The site caters to two distinct audiences: experienced traders and sports fans who are generally new to the digital asset market.

Research: An unsettling journey

Buying a Fan Token isn’t like buying a team jersey or a game ticket. Unlike mainstream e-commerce, clicking the “Buy” button redirects users to an external exchange, where the final transaction takes place.

Our user testing showed that many visitors found this sudden jump to a different website unsettling. When we asked purchasers what almost stopped them from converting, they said:

“When FanTokens.com redirected me to another trading platform, I felt a bit cautious because I wasn’t sure if it was official or safe.”

“The redirect felt a bit unsettling—raised questions about fees and custody.”

As we dug deeper, we found that visitors didn’t object to third-party exchanges per se.

“…the extra step did make me hesitate initially. Once I confirmed it was secure, I understood it was just how the trading works.”

What the visitors disliked was the surprise. The transition violated their expectations at a critical moment, reducing confidence and (very likely) overall conversions.

The original page (or control)

Here’s a section of FanTokens.com’s original homepage. Each token listed has a generic blue “Buy” button that redirects users to an external exchange.

The tested page (or variation)

Typical solutions attempt to bridge the gap between the two experiences using popups or interstitial pages—but these add unnecessary complexity to the funnel. Instead, we focused on a more elegant solution: the “Buy” buttons themselves.

To make the destination as explicit as possible before the click, we:

• Changed the button copy from “Buy” to “Buy on [exchange name]”.
• Added exchange color branding and logos directly to the CTA to foreshadow the site that users were jumping to.
• Made the buttons more visually prominent within the table.

Taken together, these changes ensured that no one who wanted to buy would be surprised by what happened next.

Results: Conversions increased by 57%

During the test, we observed a 57% increase in conversions.

This huge result highlights something we see again and again in our work: the biggest gains don’t always come from complex changes or new features. They often come from identifying moments of doubt in a user journey and resolving them in a clever way.

In this case, our three changes combined to address a moment of doubt, improved trust, and unlock a large increase in conversions.

Here’s what our client had to say

Gilbert Camilleri, CMO, The Chiliz Group.

“We didn't change the product, the price, or the promise. We just made sure users knew exactly what clicking 'Buy' meant before they clicked it. That single shift in transparency drove a 57% increase in conversions—and changed how we think about every CTA on the site.”

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 FanTokens.com 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 FanTokens.com for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic 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!

A cautionary tale of a full redesign

If you have ever been tempted to “tear it down and start over” with your website, this BBC article on a catastrophic redesign project is a must-read. It serves as a stark reminder that even with the best intentions, a complete overhaul can backfire if it loses sight of user needs.

This perfectly illustrates the points we made in our own article, How to tell if your expensive new website is useless, where we discuss why big-budget redesigns often fail to improve conversions.

(Sometimes redesigns are necessary, but they should be approached strategically, as we detail in our RealEstateU Redesign Win Report.)

This is a web page (and words matter most)

We love the brutal simplicity of this page. It’s a powerful demonstration that you don’t need complex animations or heavy graphics to be persuasive. In fact, most of the time, your words are doing the heavy lifting.

As the author, Justin Jackson, puts it:

“I wrote these words, and you’re reading them: that’s magical.”

We also got a kick out of the squirrel reference—long-time fans of our work might remember our own “conversion squirrel.”

A never-before-seen 1996 interview with Steve Jobs

The Steve Jobs Archive recently released a fascinating, previously unseen 1996 interview where Jobs discusses the early days of Pixar.

Filmed just after Toy Story became a phenomenon, it offers a rare glimpse into his thinking on storytelling, technology, and the patience required to build something truly revolutionary.

It’s a masterclass in long-term vision—something we often talk about in relation to Genchi Genbutsu style thinking.

From the archive: Why Saul Goodman is a conversion genius

Better call CRO: Why Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman is a conversion rate genius is one of our most popular articles, and for good reason. It turns out that the world’s most morally flexible TV lawyer is also a masterclass in persuasion, social proof, and understanding what your customer really wants to hear.

It’s a fun look at how even “fictional” characters can teach us a lot about the psychology of persuasion and building a brand that people (oddly) trust.

Have you come across something worth sharing?

If so, let us know. We could include it in a future article.

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.

FanTokens.com is the official partner of elite teams like Juventus, AC Milan, FC Barcelona, and Arsenal, and sells tokens for fans to trade. The tokens give fans voting rights and numerous rewards, while also being tradable assets.

The site caters to two distinct audiences: experienced traders, and sports fans who are generally new to the digital asset market.

Research: A lack of understanding

When experienced traders landed on FanTokens.com, they quickly felt at home. The site spoke their language: prices, charts, market caps, leaderboards. They already understood the mechanics—and the potential upside—so navigating the platform felt familiar.

Sports fans arrived differently.

Many had discovered Fan Tokens through their teams’ official socials. They were excited by the promised benefits, but struggled to understand what Fan Tokens were and why the site should be trusted. Responses to our research included:

“What are Fan Tokens?”

“Is this licensed or not?”

“I don’t understand how it works.”

In fact, when our research team analyzed survey responses from non-converters, a lack of knowledge was the single biggest reason they had abandoned the site.

Before thinking about price movements or market opportunities, they first needed reassurance that they understood the rules of the game.

The original page (or control)

The original homepage led with market data and token listings, but provided little explanation of what Fan Tokens were, or why the site was the official place to track them.

The tested page (or variation)

For our variation, we focused on resolving uncertainty at the very top of the page.

Our changes included:

• Clearly positioning FanTokens.com as the official Fan Tokens™ hub, not an aggregator.
• Adding clear reassurance, for example: Trusted by 80+ global sports brands.
• Explaining in plain language what Fan Tokens are—tradable assets with unique benefits.
• Highlighting holder benefits, including trade, voting rights, VIP rewards, and access.
• Framing Fan Tokens as a sports-related asset, not just another crypto market.

Results: Conversions increased by 29%

During the test, we observed a 29% increase in conversions.

This result reinforces the simple idea that explanation is often persuasion, especially if an audience is new or uncertain.

The conversion rate increase didn’t come from adding expensive new features or profit-reducing incentives; it came from making the existing value easier for a key audience to understand. By addressing uncertainty among newcomers, we increased the number of visitors confident enough to take the next step.

Here’s what our client had to say

Gilbert Camilleri, CMO of The Chiliz Group, the company behind FanTokens.com.

“We didn't add incentives or discounts to get this result—we added understanding. Seeing a 29% increase in conversions just by speaking to our audiences in plain language has fundamentally addressed the Fan Token positioning in their first touchpoint.”

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 FanTokens.com 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 FanTokens.com for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fantastic 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 operates a large online marketplace for tours, activities, and vacation packages, connecting travelers with curated experiences across one of the world’s most spectacular destinations. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.

Research: When form obstructs feeling

Previous tests for this client (and others) had shown that video content resonated strongly with visitors. This makes sense. We don’t start dreaming about an exotic holiday because of a search box on a web page. Booking a vacation is an emotional decision. We start with a picture, a story, or a moment of wonder.

And yet, when visitors arrived at the site via mobile, the content was dominated by a search form that asked for location, traveler count, and dates—all before the visitor had been inspired to care.

When our research team tested the client’s homepage against key competitors, user testers described it as “boring,” “basic,” and “unengaging.” The comment below neatly encapsulates a lot of this feedback:

“I did not care for the site, it felt basic and boring with no images to pull me in.”

The irony was that the client had truly stunning destination imagery. What if we tested its persuasive power at the start of the funnel?

The original page (or control)

Here’s an illustration of the original page showing the first step of the booking process.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we wanted to highlight some of the video content that had won before. To do that, we redesigned the search form, reducing the first step to one field.

Because the search form was now less prominent, we also added an animated text cursor inside the field to draw attention and invite interaction. Finally, we included a helpful prompt beneath the “Search Now” button for visitors who weren’t sure where to start.

Result: Bookings increased by 103%

During the test, we observed a 103% increase in bookings.

By giving the destination the spotlight, the variation turned twice as many browsers into bookers.

The principle extends beyond travel. Any time a form or configurator dominates the first screen—whether it’s a property site, a SaaS product, or an e-commerce store, you may be asking visitors to work before you’ve given them a reason to care.

For more on creating engaging funnels, see our article on the Safe Step Principle.

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.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how connecting lead times to American craftsmanship increased conversions by 22% for DiamondBack Covers, a US manufacturer of ultra-durable truck bed covers.

Research: What the sales team already knew

When we work with a client, we always spend time with their sales team. People at the sharp end of selling a product or service often have untapped insights into the things that customers care about—we call them “VOC Aggregators". They hear common objections repeatedly—and, just as importantly, they know which counter-objections resolve them.

For DiamondBack Covers, one objection came up again and again in sales conversations:

“Why does it take so long to receive a cover?”

This wasn’t just a complaint about speed. Unexplained delays can often feel arbitrary, triggering hesitation and risk aversion. When buyers didn’t understand why there was a lead time, uncertainty crept in—and uncertainty is a powerful conversion killer.

Crucially, the sales team already had an effective counter-objection:

You’re paying for quality and American craftsmanship. Every cover is built to order. If you need it faster, we offer FastTrack.

The success of this counter-objection aligned with a well-established psychological pattern: people tolerate waiting far better when it’s explained and purposeful. Explained delays—especially those tied to effort, craftsmanship, or care—are processed very differently. The lead time isn’t inefficient—it’s evidence of work being done.

Behavioral research consistently shows that effort increases perceived value and that waiting feels shorter when people believe something meaningful is happening during that time.

In our article, Why DiPS (Diagnose → Problem → Solution) thrashes meek tweaking, we say:

“The best marketers don’t guess. They find out exactly why their visitors aren’t converting, then create funnels that counter each objection at the exact moment that the visitors think about it.”

How could we surface the sales team’s counter-objection at the moment the objection formed, anchoring the delivery timeline to craftsmanship rather than logistics?

The original page (or control)

The product page displayed shipping timelines, but didn’t explain why the lead time existed.

Although there was information about a FastTrack option, the tooltip trigger (highlighted below) included a prominent $ sign that may have discouraged some visitors.

The copy for the tooltip read:

The FastTrack Fee gets your order produced and ready to ship in 3 Business Days. Does not include transit time.

*Add in the cart, non-refundable

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we added a prominent new message next to the price: “Built to order in the USA.”

By surfacing the fact that every cover is built to order in the USA, we sought to present the counter-objection at the optimal moment.

We also updated the tooltip trigger to “Need it faster,” made it more obviously a link, removed the $ sign, and rewrote the copy in the tooltip itself.

Removing the early ‘$’ sign avoided framing FastTrack as a cost before visitors understood the benefit. The revised tooltip copy also connected the cover with the “work” that the company would do to deliver it.

Taken together, we believed that these changes would connect the lead time to the craftsmanship and heritage that visitors already valued, and help them feel confident about progressing on through the sales funnel.

Results: Conversions increased by 22%

During the test, we observed an increase in conversions of 22%.

The improvement came from aligning what visitors already valued with the one thing they didn’t yet understand: the lead time.

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 DiamondBack Covers’ 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 DiamondBack Covers for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

A short video interview with the client

Having previously worked with DiamondBack Covers, we were extra delighted to welcome them back for a second engagement. Here’s what they said about their first experience of working with us.

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!