The solution comes from two (similar) approaches:

Approach 1: Steel manning

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

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

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

Approach 2: Feel–felt–found

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

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

Why these approaches work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steel manning in action: Domino’s cardboard pizza

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

“Domino’s tastes like cardboard.”

“Mass produced, boring, bland pizza.”

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

Objection. Counter-objection.

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

How to apply the above approaches to conversion

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

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

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

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

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

When steel manning backfires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: The impact of defaults

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

So… who is that person?

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

Result: Bookings increased by 1.1%

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

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3. Join our team

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4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Hopkins built an ad from the ground up

1. He asked the market what it wanted

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

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

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

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

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

2. He measured what mattered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. He said it out loud… first

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

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

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

They wanted abundant lather:

They wanted quick action:

They wanted foam that lasted:

As Hopkins said:

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

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

When you know what to say, the marketing writes itself

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

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

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: When the sale comes too soon

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

That’s good, right?

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Result: Conversions increased by 39%

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

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

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

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

Which is exactly what we did.

What next?

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

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

It opens with a whisper (0:00–0:53)

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

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

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

The confession (0:54–1:26)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life’s a game of inches (1:27–3:15)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fork in the road (3:16–3:47)

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

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

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

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

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

What are you gonna do? (3:48–4:10)

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few inches at a time

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

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: It’s been emotional

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

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

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

The original checkout (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

Result: Orders increased by 22%

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

What Google actually said

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

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

In other words, better websites.

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

When agents do the research, the bar for evidence rises

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

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

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

And the solution is the same—better websites.

Surely something has changed?

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

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

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

A question that exposes the real problem

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

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

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

Most companies are currently asking:

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

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

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

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

The core strategy

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

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!

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

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

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

The results spoke for themselves.”

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

The signed advertisement

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

The headline is five words:

“If I Bought a Car.”

And the byline reads:

“By R.E. Olds, Designer.”

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

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

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

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

Start your engines: four techniques you can use today

1. Put the maker in the buyer’s seat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Flood the reader with specifics

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

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

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

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

Here’s a great example, from Winkbeds:

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

4. Close on trust, not on price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Olds himself put it:

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

Can you see how small the change is?

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

Research: Have you really solved the problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

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

The tested pages (or variations)

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

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

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

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

Result: Variation 2 increased sales by 29%

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

Our new favorite business podcast

We’ve been getting hooked on Acquired—the business podcast whose tagline is “Every company has a story.”

Of course, we’re biased in favor of people who do real research, so we love that the two hosts go deep into the origins and strategies of every business they cover. Standout episodes include TSMC, Costco, and IKEA.

The most important software you never think about

In Seeing like a spreadsheet, David Oks traces how the humble electronic spreadsheet quietly rewired the way we all do business. Before it, financial modeling meant rooms of clerks and a week’s wait; after it, anyone could ask “what if?” and get an answer in seconds.

The essay’s argument is that every tool encodes a way of seeing the world, and the spreadsheet taught a whole economy to picture itself in rows and columns. Reading this long-term view seems especially relevant now, as we are living through another revolution in software.

Should you walk or drive to the car wash?

We heard about this AI test a while ago, but are still seeing incorrect and inconsistent answers when we try it out on different models. We include it here as a reminder that AIs can and do make mistakes.

Try this simple test on the smartest AI you know:

“I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”

The catch, of course, is that the car has to come too.

This “car wash test” has been making the rounds, and back in February, Opper put this exact question to 53 leading AI models ten times each. Only five got it right on all ten tries. The average human scored 71.5%—still not great—but enough to beat 48 of the 53 machines.

And speaking of AI’s impact…

In case you missed it, we recently published an article about the impact of AI on organic traffic, and how businesses can recover lost growth.

The article covers:

• The five fingerprints of an AI-driven traffic drop.
• Why “get more traffic” is the wrong response.
• How CRO can recover growth without recovering lost traffic.
• Why CRO may also improve your chances of being recommended by AI systems in the first place.

Not surprisingly, it’s one of the most popular pieces we’ve written this year. Read it here.

Coffee break? Can you survive 100 jumps?

Sadly, we haven’t… yet.

For your next coffee break: 100 Jumps is exactly what it sounds like. Make it through one hundred jumps in a row. That’s the whole game. It’s far harder than it looks, and a neat reminder that “simple” and “easy” are not the same.

Anyway, back to it. Anddddddd… jump!

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.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how a homepage redesign for an online store beat the control by 25%.

Green Building Supply have been selling non-toxic, eco-friendly building materials since 1991, and personally testing every product they stock. Many of their customers have multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS); others simply want to know what’s actually in the materials they’re putting into their homes.

Research: Two clear threads

Green Building Supply’s customers aren’t casual comparison shoppers. Many arrive because something in their home has already made them sick, and they’re looking for materials that won’t make it worse. They want a paint that won’t trigger their MCS, or flooring that won’t shed volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into a child’s bedroom. Here are two typical requests from website visitors:

“Some of my new furniture was off-gassing so bad I had to keep my clothes in the closet to prevent contamination. I was looking at the sealants to help mitigate this.”

“I need eco-friendly and safer chemical products… I also value the environmental concerns of making better choices for our earth.”

Shoppers like this have often learned the hard way that the safety labels on standard products may not mean much for people with conditions like MCS. The fact that something is legal to sell does not make it appropriate for everyone or eco-friendly… and the difference between those two things is Green Building Supply’s target market.

On the face of it, the company’s message of safety and personal testing should really resonate with their audience, but as a second strand of our research showed, many visitors were put off the site before they had a chance to get the message.

When our research team recruited qualified participants to evaluate Green Building Supply’s website alongside two close competitors, it ranked last in terms of users’ willingness to explore further.

In fact, the testers were specific about why they didn’t want to stay on the site. Their objections included:

• The homepage looks cluttered and outdated.
• Navigation feels complex and overwhelming.
• Lack of clear categories for different types of products.

Even those who did get the message found the site overwhelming:

“The video and all the information make this legitimate. It’s just so difficult to navigate that it doesn’t necessarily matter.”

How could we make the key message more visible and give visitors the confidence to navigate deeper into the site?

The original page (or control)

Here’s (the top) of the original homepage:

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we made multiple changes to highlight the key message and guide visitors deeper into the site:

Each of our changes targeted one or more of the objections above:

• New headline: “Most building materials are perfectly legal… That’s not the same as safe.” This echoed and reinforced the conversation hanging inside visitors’ heads, framing the company and showing that it was on their side.
• New copy: “We’ve spent 35 years personally testing every product…” highlighted the brand’s long track record and hands-on product expertise.
• New CTA buttons: “Shop Non-Toxic Flooring” and “How We Test Products” highlight both the action (browse) and the differentiator (testing).
• Four USPs within a trust bar directly under the hero: Every product is tested, same-day shipping, real expert advice, safe for MCS sufferers.
• Category navigation: A row of visual tiles for each flooring type plus paints, kitchens, and home goods, so visitors could click straight through to what they came for.

Result: +25% conversions for this test

During the test, we observed a 25% increase in transactions with visitors who were shown the variation.

By placing the core message front and center, we were able to reflect visitor concerns and highlight the testing USP. Visitors who were attracted by this message weren’t overwhelmed with options. Instead, a clear product category grid guided them deeper into the website, increasing their likelihood of exploring and buying.

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 Green Building Supply’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 Green Building Supply 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 chain of entertainment venues, where customers come to try a unique physical activity. It’s the kind of bucket-list experience that people love to talk about, and remember for years.

Research: A lack of balance

The pricing page often represents a moment of truth in a sales journey. When confronted by the real cost of a product or experience, website visitors balance that against the benefits and make their final decision.

During our user testing for this client, over half of the participants stalled at the pricing page. Despite plenty of genuinely persuasive content elsewhere on the site, the page contained nothing but a row of pricing tiles.

Excluding other content is a common weakness in poorly converting pricing pages, but why?

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes a principle he calls What You See Is All There Is. In essence, the fast and intuitive part of our brains can only work with whatever is right in front of them. A page showing only prices forces a price-only judgment.

By contrast, when we asked existing customers what finally persuaded them the answer was clear. Other people.

“I researched online and read reviews, and asked people who had been.”

“A family friend recommended trying it.”

In fact, reviews and recommendations were by far the biggest deciding factor for our client’s customers.

As we’ve written about elsewhere, social proof is a powerful form of persuasion, particularly for unusual activities like our client’s—it just wasn’t on the pricing page.

What would happen if we fixed that?

The original page (or control)

The original jumped straight from the booking funnel into pricing tiles, with no copy above the fold to frame the offer or reassure first-time visitors.

The tested page (or variation)

Here’s the page we tested, which included two simple additions above the pricing tiles:

We added a single block of “sales copy inside the funnel” at the top of the page:

• An aspirational headline: A benefit-led headline anchored in a number too big to ignore, and invited prospects to join a community of millions who’d already tried (and loved) the experience.
• A real testimonial with a face: A customer quote, attributed to a named person with a date and a photo, sitting just under the headline.
• Third-party credibility: A Google five-star rating, displayed prominently. Borrowed trust tends to outperform self-claimed trust—and a logo prospects already recognize does a lot of the work for you.

Result: Conversions increased by 8%

During the test, we observed an 8% increase in conversions.

The result confirmed the value of a pattern we’ve seen time and time again. When you provide reassurance at a moment of truth, conversions increase. In this case, our client had no shortage of persuasive content, it just wasn’t present in a critical part of the funnel.

What’s next

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

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

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

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!

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 September 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs handed the company’s ad agency the briefest of briefs. He wanted “a powerful ad campaign” to drive home the fact that the new Intel-driven Macs were beating Windows PCs at their own game.

The answer they eventually arrived at produced one of the most studied advertising campaigns of the last twenty years. Sixty-six TV ads, all 30 seconds long, all on a plain white background, all opening with the same eight words: “Hello, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.”

The ads may be low resolution, but their insights-per-pixel are off the scale.

The setup may seem simple, but Campaign magazine’s oral history of Get a Mac (free account required) reveals that the idea almost broke the team that created it. According to creative director Jason Sperling, his reactions in the weekly Marcom meetings were typically short: “That’s stupid. That is so inane. Who the hell cares about that?” By month seven, Jobs was threatening to fire the agency.

The breakthrough came when two associates, Barton Corley and Scott Trattner, simplified the brief in conversation.

Corley: “Let’s make it really simple. A Mac walks into the room right now. What does he say?”

Trattner: “Hello, I’m a Mac. And there could be a guy who says, ‘I’m a PC,’ and they talk about being computers.”

If you read our article on The hard way and the Apple way, you may find this framing somewhat familiar. As with the print ad below, the Get a Mac campaign wasn’t fought over features, it was staged with two scenes side by side, doing the comparing for you.

In this Copywriting Friday, we’ll examine the strategy at the heart of the Get a Mac campaign, then pull three specific lessons you can apply to your own marketing.

The core strategy: Talk about PC, not Mac

The breakthrough wasn’t really “make it simple.” It was an audience flip.

The agency had been coming up with reasons for people to like the Mac, but as their planning team eventually found, that wasn’t the problem. As creative director Eric Grunbaum put it:

“The problem isn’t that people don’t know Macs are great. The problem is that people that use PCs don’t understand that PCs suck. So that got us thinking, ‘We can’t just talk about the merits of Mac. We also need to talk about the challenges or the difficulty of the PC.’”

That’s a big pivot. Once the team accepted it, the format almost wrote itself. If a Mac walked into the room and started talking, he wouldn’t talk about Mac. He’d talk about PC. He’d join the conversation Windows users were already having in their heads.

Get a Mac is what comparison advertising looks like when you stop talking about yourself.

The PowerBook ad had done it on the page, with two photographs and two captions. Get a Mac did it on screen, with two characters and a white room. Both were really saying the same thing: here is what life is like with the alternative. The audience does the rest.

The three techniques below are all variations on that one move. None require a TV budget. They work just as well on a landing page, in an email, or in a sales deck.

1. Personify the choice—and make your competitor likeable

Look at almost any spot in the campaign and you’ll see the same setup: Mac, calm and easy-going. PC, well-meaning but slightly out of touch. The viewer isn’t asked to evaluate features. They’re asked to identify with one of two people.

In the Out of the Box spot at 2:35, Mac is unboxed and ready to go:

“I might make a whole movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera. I can do it all right out of the box. So what about you?”

PC, polite and apologetic, is still in his box:

“Well, first I got to download those new drivers, and I got to erase the trial software that came on my hard drive. And I’ve got a lot of manuals to read.”

Then, almost shyly: “The rest of me is in some other boxes—so I’ll meet up with you later.”

There are no comparison tables here, just one character ready to live and another character explaining why he’s not yet. If you watched it on mute, you’d still know which computer to buy.

A key part of why this works is that the PC has to be likeable. The Get a Mac team explicitly resisted the idea that PCs were stupid because their target audience was PC users. PC may be bumbling, but he’s funny and loveable. Mac may be “better”, but he’s supportive and encouraging.

Like the Short course in railroading we studied in a previous article, Get a Mac shows the power of treating your competitors fairly. The sympathetic personification of PC let the audience see themselves in the losing character without resenting the comparison. The subtext through all the ads is that PC users aren’t idiots; they just got handed the wrong computer at work.

How could you use this? If you had to play yourself and your biggest competitor as two characters in a sketch, who would they be? Not just what would they say—who would they be? For example:

• A consultancy might contrast “the agency that’s always pitching” with “the team that’s already shipping.”
• A premium e-commerce brand could play the patient craftsman against the disposable bargain-bin upstart.

The trick is that the personification has to be honest and sympathetic. PCs did come with lots of manuals and unwanted software. If the competitor feels like a straw man or a punching bag, the audience will smell it and turn away.

2. Let your competitor voice the objection

The technique that does the heaviest lifting in the campaign is the way it handles objections. In the Windows 7 launch ad at 32:10, PC tells Mac:

“Windows 7 is out and it’s not going to have any of the problems my last operating system had.”

Mac, deadpan:

“I feel like I’ve heard this before, PC.”

Cut to a flashback montage of PC promising the exact same thing about Vista. Then about Windows ME. Then 98. Then 95. Then Windows 2.

The objection being addressed is trust: why should I believe Apple’s claims about reliability when the whole industry makes claims like this? Apple doesn’t address the objection in their own voice. They put it in PC’s mouth, then let PC discredit himself.

This is a much stronger move than the standard testimonial-and-feature combo. As we explored in our analysis of how SawStop persuades skeptical people, the most powerful objections are the ones the audience didn’t quite know they had until you named them. Naming them through a competitor figure makes the move feel more honest, even when it’s clearly partisan.

How could you use this? What does your prospect quietly worry about that your category has earned a bad reputation for? If you collect client testimonials (and you should), ask your customers what they were worried about before they chose you. Their answers will address your skeptics far more efficiently than any rebuttal you could write.

3. Trade abstractions for specifics

Most copy makes abstract claims. Faster. More reliable. Easier to use. The claims aren’t really information, they’re marketing.

Get a Mac almost never makes abstract claims. It dramatizes specific moments instead.

In the MagSafe spot at 4:05, PC has been knocked to the floor.

“I was sitting on my desk, someone walked by, carelessly tripped over my power cord, yanked me straight down to the ground. Bam.”

The spot is about just one specific feature of the Mac: MagSafe. There’s no mention of price, screen, OS, software, or speed. Just Mac talking about the power cord that connects magnetically, so when it gets pulled it just “pops right off.”

Notice what the spot doesn’t do. It doesn’t claim MacBooks are “more durable” or that PCs are “vulnerable to damage.” It just shows the moment after a cord gets tripped over, and two different outcomes. This is a scenario that every prospect has imagined or lived through, and they supply their own conclusion: I want the cord that pops off.

The specificity of the MagSafe ad is what makes the one-sided comparison feel honest instead of partisan. Abstract claims feel like marketing. Specific scenarios feel like reporting.

How could you use this? We still see huge amounts of marketing that focuses on lists of abstract benefits: Save time, cut costs, improve efficiency. And because audiences have a tough time picturing abstractions, little of it sticks.

Look at the last benefit-statement you wrote. How would you dramatize it? Where does the prospect start? What happens to them? What is the moment of relief or frustration?

If you can’t picture the scene, your prospect can’t either, and the benefit-statement probably isn’t doing much work.

The hidden ratio inside the campaign

We started this article by recounting how hard it was for the ad team to get a new campaign approved by Steve Jobs. You might have thought that was the hardest part, but you’d be wrong.

The Get a Mac campaign consisted of 66 ads, but can you guess how many the team wrote, shot, and edited?

323.

That means that 257 ads—roughly four out of every five—never made it onto the air. This is a crazy ratio for advertising. Typically, an ad that is shot is aired. It’s exceedingly rare that something finished is pulled, let alone 80%.

For Apple, this was a deliberate policy. Steve Jobs killed scripts that other clients would have aired without a second thought. Spots starring Tony Robbins, James Carville, and Zach Galifianakis got scrapped because they weren’t exactly right.

And pushing for “exactly right” worked. In the four years the campaign ran, Apple’s share of the US computer and laptop market went from 4% to 8.8%, and Microsoft eventually fired back with a $300 million “I’m a PC” campaign… the surest sign that Get a Mac had got under their skin.

To be clear. The lesson of Get a Mac isn’t “shoot 323 spots,” it’s be willing to throw out good ideas so you can deliver on great ones. If your product or service walked into a room with your target audience… what would it say?

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: 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!

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.

Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive were spending fortunes telling homemakers that their detergents contained miracle ingredients. These exotic and branded compounds promised whiter whites, smoother hands, and, by implication, happier lives.

Then, in September 1949, a small California business called the Stryker Soap Company ran an ad in Reader’s Digest that did the unthinkable.

It told the truth.

What makes this ad worth studying isn’t just a grab bag of techniques; it’s a strategic positioning choice that allowed Strykers to compete against far bigger brands.

Positioning before copy

Let’s look at that strategic choice before we look at how.

Every other soap was positioning itself the same way: a miracle product, full of mysterious ingredients, capable of transformations that border on the supernatural. The subtext to the audience of the day was transparent. Buying it will make you a better spouse. A more loved parent. A more enviable neighbor.

The Strykers ad took the opposite position. We’re the soap that’s just soap. Not a miracle. Not a transformation. A darn good washing product, fairly priced, made by a company that’s happy to tell you exactly what’s in the box.

The ad has great copy, but that’s only possible because of the positioning. The counter-category framing gave the copywriter the license to write a creative, playful, and honest ad.

And we’re guessing they did it with a smile on their face.

What the position lets the ad do

Mocking the category’s language

For starters, the headline names something that doesn’t exist:

Phool-ium, we can confirm, is not a real ingredient. Nor are hooey-um, hotair-ium, or baloney-um, all of which Strykers cheerfully confirms its soap also doesn’t contain. The joke hits the target audience because they have seen the ads too.

The goal here is pattern interruption at the category level. While every other ad on the newsstand is shouting about a proprietary breakthrough, Strykers is naming the genre and making it look silly. The reader, who has been steeped in years of “Now with Ingredient X!” copy, looks up—Wait, this one’s different.

This only works because of the position. You can’t credibly mock the category’s hype if you’re planning to add some hype of your own. The position has to be authentic before the parody can land. (We’ve written before about how picking a fight with the conventions of a niche builds rapport.)

Admitting the weaknesses up front

The ad’s main block of copy is framed as a “shocking uncensored letter” from the Old Soapmaster, and most of the body is a list of things Strykers won’t do for you:

• It won’t make your whites white for life.
• It won’t make things 23½ times whiter than new.
• It won’t get you in a lather (Strykers will, but you won’t).
• It won’t help you snag a new husband.
• It won’t even do much to improve the one you may have now.
• It won’t make you look any younger.

As the ad says (and we love this line):

“It just makes soap bubbles… not hope bubbles.”

Humor aside, the psychology at play here is straightforward. When a person or product tries the hard sell, our defenses go up. When they tell us what they can’t do, we tend to relax. The ad is leveling with us in a humorous way. And from that point on, every positive claim Strykers does make lands with much more weight.

Notice that this also only works because of the position. A brand selling miracle ingredients can’t run a list of damaging admissions; it would contradict the entire pitch.

Earning the right to be specific

Once the damaging admissions have done their work, watch what happens when Strykers finally turns to selling. The ad gets two short paragraphs to make its case, and the specifics are striking:

Look at how concrete those claims are. Not “better.” Not “more effective.” Ten to fifteen per cent soapier. More actual soap by weight.

Here’s the thing about specifics: they only persuade if the reader believes you. Strykers’ competitors were also full of numbers (“23½ times whiter!”), but the reader had learned to discount them. The damaging admissions earlier in the ad have flipped the polarity. Now, when the writer says “ten to fifteen per cent,” the reader thinks: Well, if he’s been this honest about what the soap doesn’t do, the number is probably real.

Proof works in context, not in isolation. A guarantee, a statistic, or a test result is only as persuasive as the surrounding copy allows it to be. (See our ultimate guide to proof for the main categories of proof you can deploy, and our analysis of how to persuade skeptical audiences for how the order of claims affects whether they get believed.)

The point here is that the structure of this ad matters. Because Strykers earns the right to be specific, their claims land harder.

Naming what’s actually in the box

Finally, the copywriter calls back to the ad’s headline to turn the joke into a sale. The last block of body copy is a lovely piece of work:

The competitors’ strategy was to take a common ingredient and give it an exotic name. Strykers does the opposite. They name the real ingredient, explain what it is in plain English, and connect it to something the reader already values—the same stuff you get in hand lotions that cost scandalous prices.

And, again, the only reason this works is the position. A brand selling miracles couldn’t credibly say “it’s just glycerin.” A brand selling honesty can, and the unvarnished description makes the product feel more premium, not less, because the reader does the work of comparing it to expensive hand lotion themselves.

The lesson is much broader than soap. If your product has a genuine, demonstrable advantage, the most persuasive thing you can do is describe it the way a friend would describe it. No exotic words or trademarks… just what it is and what it does.

Copy like this feels more like a conversation among friends than a pitch, but it still sells.

Can your brand make a clean break?

Over 75 years after the ad was published, most marketing categories still run on phool-ium. Products get dressed up with capitalized ingredients, vague superlatives, and breathless promises. The arms race never really ends and nobody wins it, because readers learn to discount the whole genre.

The lesson of the Strykers ad is that the way out is a different position. Decide what you’re going to claim, and decide what you’re going to refuse to claim, and let the copy follow.

When Volkswagen ran their classic “Think Small” ad for the VW Beetle a decade after Strykers, they were drawing on the same playbook. Tell the truth. Admit the weaknesses. Trust the reader to do the math. This positioning strategy works.

In your business, the question isn’t whether your competitors are running on phool-ium. They almost certainly are. The question is whether you have the position that lets you run without.

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: 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!