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

The challenge of growing on Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Less than you might think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they follow a tried and tested process.

Why you should always start with research

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon funnel research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For that, you need to go deeper.

Voice of the customer research

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

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

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

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

Well, yes, but there’s a problem.

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

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

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

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

Not exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

Method marketing research

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

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

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

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

User test your Amazon funnel (and your competitors’)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn your research insights into test ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can do the Amazon equivalent with your research:

Insight → Problem → Counter-objection → Amazon improvement

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

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

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

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

Building your testing plan

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

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

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

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

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

What you can actually change

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

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

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

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

Prioritize your tests to create a ranked list

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run your first test (but not on Amazon)

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

User testing and A/B usability testing

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

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

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

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

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

The two things Amazon won’t let you test

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to test on Amazon, finally

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

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

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

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

The mistake that costs sellers the most

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief word on reviews

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

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

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

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

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

Build your Amazon CRO process

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

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

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

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

Good luck.

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

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

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

In the book, you’ll discover how to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The belief that great copywriters share

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aiming at a desire that’s already burning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s 6 and 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t just state a benefit; stage the scene

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the searches:

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

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

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

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

Could I point a camera at this?

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

Name the thing standing in your customers’ way

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

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

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

The wanting was always there

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

Research: Seeing a competitive gap

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

The full redesign included:

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

And here’s the mobile version:

Result: Ticket sales increased by 10%

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

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

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Churnet Valley Railway’s business and then to other clients. The template proved portable enough that we ran the same play on a second dining product page soon after—with an even bigger result.

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: A marketplace has two sides

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

In detail, our changes included:

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

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

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

Result: Tutor applications increased by 15%

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

But there is an alternative worth considering.

340 million spoonfuls of sugar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change the medium, not just how you say it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Lead with the delight

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

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

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

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

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

Give your audience some rhyme time

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

What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals.

Became:

What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks.

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

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

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

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

(You get the idea.)

Absurd specificity makes mental movies

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

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

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

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

The real lesson

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

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

Result: Order value increased by 28%

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

A short video interview with the client

A transcript of the video

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what we loved about CRE is the flexibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

How one brand flipped its fortune by horsing around

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

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

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

Here’s the whole script:

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

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

What’s happening beneath the humor

It speaks to the buyer, not the user

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you trust them to do it right?

The salutation is a three-second filter

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sells the feeling, not the feature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The comedy is the pitch

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

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

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

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

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

We think you should probably cut them wherever you can.

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

The response that made it legendary

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

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

Here’s one of his replies to Alyssa Milano:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writers you’d like to write like

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

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: A team that visitors never met

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

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

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

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

What is the age of the youngest homeowner?

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

Result: Leads increased by 79%

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: Not all conversions are worth the same

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

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

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

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

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

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

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

Result: Revenue increased 26%

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

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

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

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

What next?

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

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

The agony of waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jobs sold the problem before he sold the product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He answered your objection before you could raise it

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

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

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

Long pause.

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

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

“Yuck.”

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

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

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

He turned every spec into a reason to care

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the numbers are specific.

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

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

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

He let other people make his boldest claims

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

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

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

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

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

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

One idea per screen

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

Almost nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you getting it yet?”

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

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

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2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

Fortunately, at CRE, we always start with research.

Our data-driven strategy

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

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

Instead of:

• Big decision → big risk → irreversible consequences.

…you get:

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

Our data-driven redesign strategy has three parts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to plan a website redesign project

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

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

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

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

The homepage test

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

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

The key changes were:

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

When a lever works, pull it again

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

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

The Breakfast Train (+10%)

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

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

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

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

The Midweek Lunch Train (+48%)

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

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

CRO is never done

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

The dining listing page (+13%)

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

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

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

A dining FAQ (+9%)

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

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

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

The “show” that sold out Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

What compounding actually looks like

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

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

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

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

The real lesson: You can engineer your way to growth

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

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

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

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

No sweeping redesigns. Instead:

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

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

What’s next for Churnet Valley Railway?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

The solution comes from two (similar) approaches:

Approach 1: Steel manning

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

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

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

Approach 2: Feel–felt–found

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

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

Why these approaches work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steel manning in action: Domino’s cardboard pizza

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

“Domino’s tastes like cardboard.”

“Mass produced, boring, bland pizza.”

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

Objection. Counter-objection.

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

How to apply the above approaches to conversion

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

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

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

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

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

When steel manning backfires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

Research: The impact of defaults

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

So… who is that person?

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

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

The original page (or control)

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

The tested page (or variation)

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

Result: Bookings increased by 1.1%

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

Schedule your FREE strategy session

2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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

Download a free copy of our best-selling book

3. Join our team

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

4. Contact us

We help businesses worldwide, so get in touch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Hopkins built an ad from the ground up

1. He asked the market what it wanted

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

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

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

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

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

2. He measured what mattered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. He said it out loud… first

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

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

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

They wanted abundant lather:

They wanted quick action:

They wanted foam that lasted:

As Hopkins said:

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

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

When you know what to say, the marketing writes itself

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

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

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

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

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

See you next time on Copywriting Friday.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

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

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

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2. Learn how to do conversion

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

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3. Join our team

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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!